By Evan Calbi •

I’m drawn to characters who don’t easily express themselves. If they won’t share how they’re feeling, their emotions often manifest in behavior that can set a story in motion. But how do you reveal an avoidant character? You need to tease out the underlying emotional truth and find ways to say what’s unsaid. 

I’ve divided the methods to reveal avoidant characters into the following strategies: the character explains, the narrator explains, and the story explains. The first strategy, the character explains, features the use of interiority to show what a character cannot or won’t express. It’s a common strategy in third-person point of view and not discussed here. I’m interested in the other two strategies for managing emotional avoidance, how a narrator can intrude and explain in a direct address to the reader, and how the story can explain with the addition of external pressure added to the plot. 

Among the many stylistic choices of the novel, narrative intrusion or the direct address was at one time a popular technique. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, published in 1813, features an omniscient narrator limited for the most part to Elizabeth Bennet’s point of view, but the narrator also speaks directly to the reader. Here’s an example in the final chapter: “I wish I could say, for the sake of her family, that the accomplishment of her earnest desire in the establishment of so many of her children, produced so happy an effect as to make her a sensible, amiable, well-informed woman for the rest of her life.”

The narrator is discussing Mrs. Bennet’s character directly with the reader. This address comes at the end of a novel, and the narrative consciousness of the authorial I that emerges is a surprise. The narrator is, of course, Jane Austen. The direct address was a common strategy in Austen’s time, but it began to be criticized in the twentieth century as an unrealistic approach that interfered with the reader’s suspension of disbelief. The strategy of narrative intrusion was subsumed by the dogma of show, don’t tell, a narrative strategy that is still largely followed today. Here is an explanation in Wayne C. Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction:

Since Flaubert, many authors and critics have been convinced that “objective” or “impersonal” or “dramatic” modes of narration are naturally superior to any mode that allows for direct appearances by the author or his reliable spokesman. Sometimes…the complex issues involved in this shift have been reduced to a convenient distinction between “showing,” which is artistic, and “telling,” which is inartistic.

While the direct address is thought to be largely an outdated narrative strategy, it still finds its way into modern work. Here’s an example from Jennifer Egan’s chapter “Safari” in A Visit from the Goon Squad:

“I think [Dad’s] going to marry Mindy,” Charlie says.

“No way! You said he didn’t love her.”

“So? He can still marry her.”

They sink onto the sand, still faintly warm, radiating a lunar glow. The ghost sea tumbles against it.

“She’s not so bad,” Charlie says.

“I don’t like her. And why are you the world’s expert?”

Charlie shrugs. “I know Dad.”

Charlie doesn’t yet know herself. Four years from now, at eighteen, she’ll join a cult across the Mexican border whose charismatic leader promotes a diet of raw eggs; she’ll nearly die from salmonella poisoning before Lou rescues her. A cocaine habit will require partial reconstruction of her nose, changing her appearance, and a series of feckless, domineering men will leave her solitary in her late twenties, trying to broker peace between Rolph and Lou, who will have stopped speaking.

Gone is the authorial I of Austen speaking directly to the reader, but the narrator in Egan’s story is addressing her audience all the same, leaping ahead to teenage Charlie’s future. There are a few things to keep in mind: the direct address often results from an omniscient narrator, and the result reveals the character, the narrator, and the triangulation between the two and the reader.

A substantial part of modern fiction consists of characterization, and it needs to be interesting enough to hold a reader’s attention, and, hopefully, keep them entertained. Austen and Egan’s strategy of the direct address allows for another possibility. You can make the narration interesting through the characterization of the narrator. 

A second strategy to reveal an emotionally avoidant character is to let the story explain by applying external pressure to the story’s shape or plot to reveal an emotion that is left unspoken. It’s less direct than narrative intrusion, but it’s a strategy that can transform a story. Yiyun Li adopts this approach in “Love in the Marketplace,” a story from her debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. The story focuses on Sansan, who, “at thirty-two, does not have a husband, a lover, or a close friend. Since graduation from college, she has been teaching English at the Educators’ School in the small town where she grew up, a temporary job that has turned permanent.”

Sansan’s mother believes that her daughter’s failure to find a partner killed Sansan’s father, and the return of Sansan’s childhood love brings it back to the surface. Tu, “the childhood companion and classmate and boyfriend and fiancé at one time or another in her life,” has returned from America newly divorced:

After a moment, Sansan asks, “What happened to Tu?”

“His parents came by yesterday, and asked if you wanted to go back to him.”

“Why?”

“A man needs a woman. You need a husband, too.”

“Is that what I am, a substitute?”

“Don’t act willful. You’re not a young girl anymore.”

“Why did he get a divorce?”

“People change their minds. Sansan, if you ask me, I would say just go back to Tu without questioning.”

“Is that what Tu wants? Or is it his parents’ idea?”

“What’s the difference? He’ll marry you if you want to go back to him, that’s what his parents said.”

“That would make it an arranged marriage.”

“Nonsense. We’ve seen you two grow up together from the beginning,” Sansan’s mother says. “Even in arranged marriages, people fall in love.”

Sansan feels a sting in her heart. “Sure, people fall in love in arranged marriages, but that’s not the love I want.”

Sansan’s mother believes she’s been waiting for Tu because he took her virginity and thus her ability to marry, but Sansan refused to have sex with him before he left to marry another woman, and she hasn’t been waiting for his return. It’s at this point that Li introduces external pressure to the story: “A man enters the marketplace, in a dirty shirt and jeans and carrying a shapeless bag.” He sits down in a space between two stalls, takes off his shirt, and cuts himself with a knife, “the kind with a long and sharp blade that fruit vendors use to cut watermelons.”

Sansan and a few other people watch in amazement. With his own blood, he writes a message to the market crowd. “The man dips his index finger in the blood, checks his finger as if he is a calligrapher, and writes down the words on the cardboard box: ‘Give me ten yuan and I will let you slice me once wherever you like; if you finish my life with one cut, you owe me nothing.’”

Sansan’s mother gives him ten yuan, but she can’t bring herself to cut him, and he drops the bill at his feet. Then Sansan hands him the bill, and he gives her the knife. She studies his body and her fingers trace his skin. The story ends with this sentence: “‘Don’t worry, Mama,’ Sansan says, and turns to smile at her mother before she points the knife at the man’s shoulder and slices, slowly opening his flesh with love and tenderness.”

Sansan’s mother is killing her daughter by a thousand cuts, and the pressure exerted on the story can be felt in the force of the knife’s blade on the man’s skin. The act of slicing into his skin speaks in all the ways that mother and daughter have avoided. What would the story look like without this insertion of external pressure in the form of the man in the market? There’s a version that ends with the revelation that Sansan’s mother has assumed she’s single because she lost her virginity to Tu, but Li goes further and applies external pressure until the thousand cuts Sansan feels are manifested in her slicing into the man’s skin. 

The strategy of applying external pressure often results in a character who appears late in a story and reshapes it. It offers a way of bringing unexpressed emotions forward so the reader is clear about the stakes. What’s the cause of reticence? That’s different for every character. What’s the effect? The idea is that the effect of reticence, if your character won’t express what they are feeling, can expand outward until the plot asserts itself and speaks into the silence. 

Because I am often uncertain about everything, I find that when managing either of these strategies, it helps to retreat from certainty. Austen’s direct address is an example. The passage quoted earlier ends this way (italics mine):

I wish I could say, for the sake of her family, that the accomplishment of her earnest desire in the establishment of so many of her children, produced so happy an effect as to make her a sensible, amiable, well-informed woman for the rest of her life; though, perhaps, it was lucky for her husband, who might not have relished domestic felicity in so unusual a form, that she still was occasionally nervous and invariably silly.

Perhaps it was lucky for her husband. The narrator is unsure if Mrs. Bennet’s “nervous and invariably silly” nature was, in the end, a good thing, and she addresses the reader to say so much. 

Sansan doesn’t have any answers, either, but in cutting the man in the marketplace, she feels seen. Yi writes: “The man’s muscles loosen under her caressing finger; after all these years, she finally meets someone who understands what a promise is. Crazy as they may seem to the world, they are not alone, and they will always find each other.”

Would Sansan have remained alone if Li had not exerted external pressure on her life and introduced the man in the marketplace? What’s so effective in these methods for me is that the narrators in these stories, whether they address the reader directly or apply external pressure to manifest an unspoken emotion, invite the reader to contemplate their characters with them. Both strategies are, ultimately, ways to build intimacy in a story, and both are possible workarounds for characters who are incapable of creating that space themselves.

 

---

EVAN CALBI’s writing has appeared Los Angeles Review of Books, Valparaiso Fiction Review, and other publications. He co-edited the anthology, L.A. Exile; A Guide to Los Angeles Writing. A graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, he’s currently pursuing a PhD in literature at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He lives in Barcelona. 

Featured image by Ekaterina Kuznetsova, courtesy of Unsplash.