Daniel Mason's "A Case Study" is a good story, but also a borderline transparent one in terms of figuring out "the point," if I can be so inelegant about the purpose of reading as to call it that. A young man in medical school starts visiting a therapist when he's going through a rough patch. We don't know what the rough patch is, only that there is one. The young man finds the therapist helpful, and he sticks with it for a few years. When he moves away, he thinks the therapist might share some secret about the young man at their last meeting, some summarizing "here's your deal" kind of statement, but nothing comes. This leads the young man to a lifelong obsession with what the therapist really thinks of the narrator. The narrator feels like he has given away something he shouldn't have, like the therapist now has in his possession something the man wants back. He both wants and does not want to know what the therapist really thought of him. He gets his chance when the therapist asks his permission, years later, to write up notes about him in a book. They'll be anonymized, but the man will recognize himself in the pages. The narrator gives his permission, but afraid to know what the therapist really thinks about him, he never reads what was said. He keeps seeing the book everywhere, but he still never reads it. It starts to drive him a little crazy, until finally, his daughter asks for his help with a report about the book. He reads it at long last, only to discover he's not even in it. Either the therapist anonymized it so much even the man himself couldn't recognize where he appeared, or he just didn't include the man in the book at all.
A friend at work and I sometimes discuss the notion of therapy. I've never really gone and I don't want to, because I've known so many people who did go and I don't think it did them any good. My friend does go, and she always wants to convince me to go, mostly because she gets worn out dealing with my anxiety over how people will perceive things I do. She tells me to repeat to myself the words of Alexis Rose from Schitt's Creek: "Nobody cares, David." People tend to think everyone is scrutinizing us all the time, but in reality, most people are too wrapped up in their own shit to spare time and effort to analyze us too deeply. This is true of doctors as well. They might kvetch about us to their families or even make fun of us to let of steam, but even then, they're probably not thinking too much about us, and they're definitely not thinking of us years later. The man in the story thought his mental health issues were shameful and profound and unique, but they were so boring, either his therapist could easily anonymize them so well even the man didn't know it was him, or it wasn't compelling enough to make the cut. Nobody cares, David.
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| I've seen this show, so I think I'm basically good, emotionally. |
I tell my friend her advice is so good, I don't need therapy.
That's not all there is to find in this story, but that's a good chunk of it, I think. At least this was a quick write-up, if not an interesting one, because Mason wasn't thinking about me when he wrote his story. In a good way, hardly anyone ever is.
Your friend sounds like a wise and stable genius.
ReplyDeleteShe's both, and I'm still not going to therapy.
DeleteI have some sympathy with your friend.
ReplyDeleteI'm quite fond of Mason's collection, A Registry of My Passage Upon This Earth, fiction that uses historical and scientific reality as a starting point. Hmm, something like Andrea Barret, in fact.
I do agree, however, that this story doesn't take much digging. I dug anyway.
The crux of much neurosis is a conundrum: how can I be so insignificant, yet always be the center of everyone's scrutiny?
So we've been discussing this question in emails and maybe it'd be fun to open it up here:
ReplyDeleteIs there such a thing as an unreliable third-person narrator? And: in this story, is the third-person narrator unreliable?
My view (unschooled) hinges on the difference between the character, and the narrator. In third person limited, is the narrator the character? How can they be seen as separate? If the narrator is seeing things through the character's eyes, can the the character see and understand something in a certain way, but the narrator conveys it differently to the reader? How would that work (examples)?
In this story, obviously the character sees things that are not reported by the narration - he has lunch, talks to colleagues, plays with his kids (let's assume). These are not essential to the story, so the narration doesn't include them. Is this considered the unreliability of the narrator? Is it possible for the narrator to omit something that turns out to be important, and it gets inserted later? Doesn't that make for a clumsy story? Say he had an affair with the psychologist's daughter, and when the guy contacts him to include him in the case study, he wonders if the psychologist ever found out about it; this is the first time the reader is clued in. Would that be an example of unreliable narration?
As far as the madman/liar/picaro/drunk stuff goes, aren't those unreliable characters, rather than unreliable narrators? That's if character does not equal narrator. I've been calling the med student/surgeon in the story 'the narrator' but are they equal?
This should get us started if anyone's interested.
Perhaps I am just out to lunch, but I think that the narrator is NOT the med student/surgeon. They have to be separate entities.
ReplyDeleteI think the generally accepted idea is that in 3rd person limited, the narrator is not a character. The narrator is a voice detached from the story. Or if you prefer visual metaphors, it's the camera that follows the main character. With limited 3rd person, the voice/camera is limited to what the main character knows/sees/experiences or thinks.
ReplyDeleteSo to me, the disembodied voice of the narrator in third person limited has to be presumed to be reliable in so far as it is actually showing us what a character thinks/sees/experiences. However, if it is following a madman/picaro, etc., it can end up having a similar feel to a first person unreliable narrator story in that the reader won't fully trust what the five senses of the narrator are recording. This is especially true in a mystery or suspense narrative, where we expect that the narrator, only able to gather information through the point-of-view character, is missing key information that would affect everything in the story.
One key difference between the two approaches is that a first person unreliable narrator is going to let you know about themselves as much through what they don't say as what they do say, and we'll have to judge each statement for ourselves. Third person will just show us what there is to know about the character.
In this story, the third person limited is chosen specifically because it is reliable and impartial, presumably how a doctor would write up their notes in the kind of book the main character so dreads being a part of.
That connection between the choice of pov and the substance of the story is really interesting, I hadn't considered that. There's a lot of interesting writing going on in this story.
DeleteIs there a book on all this? I looked up narratology, most of them are extremely complex (not to mention expensive). I used to have Brian Richardson's Unnatural Voices, Extreme Narrations, but it must've been a library copy since I no longer have it. Is there something else that might be more mainstream?
I haven't myself done any kind of exhaustive research into POV such as a study of narratology. I'm just going off how it's taught in your average writing fiction textbook or taught in most fiction writing classes. I always recommend the Burroway one, but there are plenty.
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