I Open at the Close: Breaking the Rules of Narrative Distance in Harry Potter

(Wrote this as a midterm for a class on narrative distance, figured it's nerdy enough I should post it here. - Bug)

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban opens on a very concrete image, that of its protagonist reading a book under the covers of his bed.  The subject of the book within a book is somewhat unusual--it discusses witch burning in the medieval era from the perspective of the witches--but the image is otherwise ordinary and familiar.  However, within two paragraphs Rowling introduces the reader to the true conceit of the book with the following tongue-in-cheek statement: “Harry Potter was a highly unusual boy in many ways.  For one thing, he hated the summer holidays.  For another, he really wanted to do his homework but was forced to do it in secret, in the dead of night.  And he also happened to be a wizard” (POA 1).  

This kind of subtle, crafty introduction to the world of wizarding Britain constitutes a break from the narrative distance that composes the rest of the books, which normally follow Harry’s point of view and report only thoughts or observations the character himself would have, following the conventions of free indirect discourse from the third-person limited perspective.  Harry is not describing himself as “a highly unusual boy in many ways;” the omniscient author-figure is intruding to give the reader information about the character that the character himself would not think to give (POA 1).   Rowling opens all seven Harry Potter novels at a greater distance from the protagonist than the rest of the books, using peripheral narrators or authorial intrusions to bring the reader gradually into Harry’s fictional world.

Wayne C. Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction describes the specific uses of reliable authorial commentary such as the type of commentary that Rowling uses at the beginning of each of the Harry Potter books.  Booth says that “the most obvious task for a commentator is to tell the reader about facts that he could not easily learn otherwise,” a principle which J. K. Rowling follows throughout each of her books’ introductory chapters (169).  Early in Prisoner of Azkaban, the narrative mentions “the wizarding paper, The Daily Prophet” when Harry receives a clipping in the mail from a friend (6).  Harry himself has read The Daily Prophet many times before and so would not consciously think of the news as coming from “the wizarding paper;” this information comes directly from an objective, reliable narrator that comments on the scene from the outside (ibid).  However, the story runs the risk of confusing the reader if it simply mentions a concept such as The Daily Prophet without any sort of exposition, and the authorial intrusion therefore becomes necessary to convey information the audience needs in order for the action to flow smoothly and make sense.

Rowling also uses the authorial commentary near the beginning of each Harry Potter book to convey information to the reader that the story itself does not need to show explicitly.  Booth says that the well-utilized objective narrator “tells us a good deal about those aspects of the tale which, though necessary, are not entitled to the heightening that would come if they were dramatized” (170).  Booth also emphasizes that even omniscient narrators do not have to be objective, but can simply tell the reader how to feel about certain characters if that information will help move the story forward (79).  The first Harry Potter book, Philosopher’s Stone, begins by not only stating outright who the Dursleys are but also heavily implying an opinion about them: “Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.  They were the last sort of people you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or unusual, because they simply didn’t stand for that kind of nonsense” (PS 3).  Those lines hint at the Dursleys’ collective voice with the diction “thank you very much” and “that kind of nonsense,” but offer information that clearly does not come from the Dursleys themselves or from Harry (PS 3). 

Instead, the narrator is an omniscient observer who evidently does not have a high opinion of people who pride themselves on normalcy, and who knows the Dursleys’ entire lives right up until the moment that their infant nephew shows up on their doorstep.  The narrator thus conveys the Durselys’ relationships to each other, to Mrs. Dursley’s estranged sister Lily, and to their image-conscious neighborhood in a few brief lines.  None of this information needs to be dramatized for the action to matter, and so it is not; instead the narrator simply delivers it briefly and moves forward into the interesting parts of the story. 

Authorial Commentary

Orson Scott Card strongly recommends authorial intrusions at the beginnings of science fiction and fantasy works, because such intrusions solve the problem of exposition unique to speculative fiction (83).  Card discusses the problems of introducing entirely fictional concepts in such a way that the concepts are integrated into a larger world but also do not throw off the reader.  The author must strike the right balance when setting up exposition: “too much raw information up front and the reader can’t keep it all straight; too little information and the reader can’t figure out what’s happening. The result in either case is confusion, impatience, boredom” (88).  The universe that underpins the Harry Potter series contains literally hundreds of fictional concepts; Rowling uses objective commentary to deliver information about the wizarding world to her readers quickly in the early pages of her stories, but she always opens her novels in the Muggle (non-magical) world, a place where the reader does not need too much information all at once in order to understand the immediate scene. 

Chamber of Secrets, the second book in the series, successfully avoids dumping information on the reader through hiding a great deal of its exposition in the narrative of its opening scene, using descriptors such as “All Harry’s spellbooks, his wand, robes, cauldron and top-of-the-range Nimbus Two Thousand broomstick had been locked in a cupboard under the stairs by Uncle Vernon the instant Harry had come home” (8).  This sentence alone not only fits into the omniscient description of Harry’s current argument with his uncle but also informs the reader that Harry studies magic at a school, that he flies on a broomstick, and that his relatives disapprove of his magical education.  Rowling elegantly brings the reader into the unfamiliar world through showing the main character first in a highly familiar situation, where he is sitting at breakfast arguing with his relatives over the noise his pet bird makes, and then introducing a highly unusual element when Harry casually mentions “the magic word” when prompting his cousin to be polite and his aunt and uncle react as though he has just shouted a threat (COS 2).  This structure fits well with Card’s recommendation because it does not start the reader off with a massive information dump about the wizarding world, but still creates interest and rapidly brings in key hints about magic through allowing characters who are relatively ignorant on the subject to converse about it in the early pages. 

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the fifth book in the series, also begins on a concrete image of its protagonist engaged in a seemingly ordinary activity in a familiar neighborhood that contains only the slightest hints it belongs in a magical world.  The narrator, who is clearly too far away from the action to be Harry himself, describes the neighborhood: “The hottest day of the summer so far was drawing to a close and drowsy silence lay over the large, square houses of Privet Drive... and the only person left outdoors was a teenage boy who was lying flat on his back in the flowerbed of number four” (OOTP 1).  The scene has no immediate out-of-the-ordinary details and simply continues to describe an apparently average teenage boy listening to the news through the window of his house until midway through the third page, when, upon hearing a loud noise nearby, he abruptly sits up and pulls a magical wand out of his pocket.  The rest of the story only uses Harry’s point of view, referring to non-magical people as “Muggles” and making no explicit mention of exterior information about its hero, but the first few pages give the reader information Harry himself would not have, describe him from the point of view of an outsider (“a black-haired bespectacled boy who had the pinched, slightly unhealthy look of someone who has grown a lot in a short space of time”), and adopt a narrative voice that knows nothing about the nature of magic (OOTP 2).  After this brief introduction, Rowling transitions smoothly into using only close third-person narration inside Harry’s own mind, maintaining that focus on only knowledge Harry himself would have throughout the rest of the novel.

Narrative Shifts

The commentator at the beginning of many of the Harry Potter books may be ostensibly omniscient, but almost appears to be more of a magically naïve Muggle than an all-knowing being most of the time.  Jauss emphasizes that when authors discuss omniscience, they are “not referring to its ostensible meaning—“all-knowing” or “truthful”—but to the narrative technique of reporting—whether accurately or not—characters’ thoughts and feelings” (31).  Rowling’s narrator at the beginning of so many of her novels certainly does not know everything about the wizarding world, and in fact seems to be missing most of the key information about the way the world works, simply viewing events from the point of view of any Muggle.  Deathly Hallows’s first sentence is “The two men appeared out of nowhere, a few yards apart in the middle of the narrow, moonlit lane” (7).  If a wizard was describing the same scene, he or she could just use the jargon term for the action the two men just performed, and phrase the sentence “the two men apparated.” 

However, Rowling chooses not to introduce any magical terminology at first and so instead describes the men’s actions without any apparent knowledge of their significance, saying “they raised their left arms in a kind of salute,” an action that signals to the knowledgeable reader that both characters are Death Eaters but which is granted no significance in the text (DH 8).  The perspective is not quite objective—the omniscient narrator moves inside the heads of several other Death Eaters in the scene that follows, and comments on the “opulent” manor that has been “carelessly” invaded when the men enter—but it chooses to leave out information that only a wizard (or a knowledgeable reader) would know upon first bringing the reader into the story (DH 12).  The deliberate limit on the narrator’s omniscience allows the narrator to comment on the action of the story without indicating so much casual understanding of the wizarding world that new readers will be lost at first.   

Even though several of Rowling’s novels begin with Muggle-like authorial omniscience and quickly transition into free indirect discourse, the shift is not jarring and in fact is barely noticeable. James Wood describes the advantages of the type of third-person distance that does not clearly distinguish between a character’s thoughts and the author’s objective description in How Fiction Works: “This is tremendously subtle.  It is so flexible, so capable of inhabiting different levels of comprehension and irony, so full of poignant identification with [the character], yet constantly… moving away from her, back toward the author” (15).  Further, Wood says, the moment the author chooses to insert any kind of commentary that the character would make on a particular scene or emotion, “the narrative seems to float away from the novelist and take on the properties of the character, who now seems to ‘own’ the words” (9). 

In Order of the Phoenix, Rowling first signals the shift away from the objective description of the neighborhood and into Harry’s point of view with one such key use of words that Harry clearly owns, when Harry describes his uncle “grinning in a horrible, manic way until all the curious neighbors had disappeared” (4).  As Wood points out, a single adverb can signal character commentary, and in this case Harry’s dislike for his uncle comes through when he describes Uncle Vernon’s smile as “horrible,” a word that the omniscient author probably would not have used to describe an unknown character smiling (OOTP 4).  The comment on Uncle Vernon’s smile is the first clear instance of Harry’s point of view emerging in the novel, but there are also several relatively objective paragraphs that occur without commentary from either Harry or the distant narrator between the last clear use of omniscience and the first clear use of free indirect discourse; the end result is that the omniscient narrator falls away subtly and the narration moves inside Harry’s head without drawing attention to itself.

Although Rowling’s use of distant authorial commentary strikingly removes the first few chapters of her second, third, and fifth books from the rest of the series, the other books in the series open on an even more striking break from Harry’s point of view.  The fourth book in the series, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, opens with the same use of omniscient commentary but quickly moves into the third-person limited point of view of an entirely different character from Harry himself, one who knows nothing about magic.  This Muggle (non-magical) narrator only tells the story for a single chapter before he dies and Harry picks up the story.  This narrative break fits with David Jauss’s principle of all narrative distance, that “the most important purpose of point of view is to manipulate the degree of distance between the characters and the reader in order to achieve the emotional, intellectual, and moral responses the author desires” (30). 

In the case of Goblet of Fire, the Muggle narrator at the beginning offers the reader much-needed perspective on the major characters of the story: despite not having Harry’s moral convictions or personal history with the villain Lord Voldemort, he nonetheless realizes quickly that Voldemort is a reprehensible person, and also unknowingly conveys valuable information about the plot that Harry himself does not know, creating an ironic distance from the character which remains throughout most of the novel (GOF 9).  The narrative shift at the beginning of the book accomplishes exactly what Jauss says any point of view should: it gives the reader intellectual information that will later become important for the plot, develops the reader’s moral sympathy for the protagonist struggling against the terrible villain Voldemort who kills the Muggle narrator in the beginning of the book, and ensures that the book opens on an emotionally charged scene where an innocent old man is murdered in his own home.  In this case, if the novel simply began within Harry’s point of view, then the narrative would have to tell the reader how to feel about Harry’s struggle against Voldemort and might not be able to convey the information about the plot that the reader needs in order to have certain expectations about the rest of the book. 

Beginnings and Endings

According to Card, for any story set in a fictional world where the structure of the fictional world itself is the plot of the book, “the beginning point is obvious—when the stranger arrives” (77).  The Muggle narrators that Rowling uses to open her first, fourth, and sixth novels each encounter a “stranger” or a magical being almost immediately; Rowling chooses to take a moment from each Muggle’s story when that Muggle begins to learn about the magical world. For all that the first paragraphs of Philosopher’s Stone emphasize that the Dursleys are “perfectly ordinary, thank you very much,” the first scene also contains a moment when Mr. Dursley sees a housecat reading a map on a street corner (1).  

The description of Mr. Dursley’s ordinary day continues to contain unusual details: owls fly past in broad daylight, people in cloaks whisper to each other in groups, and eventually a man appears out of thin air just as the house cat morphs into a human woman (PS 12). Card says “the beginning [of a fantasy novel] must make the audience ask questions… it creates tension in the audience and makes them feel a need,” and Rowling creates this “need” by suggesting that, no matter how ordinary Mr. Dursley’s day may appear to be from his own point of view, his entire world is about to change (Card 75).  The mystery created in the first few pages of Philosopher’s Stone—the question of how the wizarding world and Muggle world will respond to infant Harry Potter’s defeat of Lord Voldemort—will take seven books to answer, but each question the Muggle narrators ask does have an answer within the text.  Each Muggle narrator then comes to the magical world as a naïve observer with whom the audience can empathize, but also encounters magic almost immediately in order to begin the process of asking questions which the plot of the novel will answer. 

Jauss criticizes a fellow analyst for terming Fluabert’s breaks in his narrative style “mistakes,” saying “if they’re mistakes, Flaubert certainly made a lot of them… I submit that there’s a much less convoluted and far more logical way to explain these intrusions… the narrator’s techniques may change, but the narrator does not” (34).  Conventional wisdom may dictate that stories use only a single type of narrative distance and never break from a particular point of view, but Jauss suggests that any work of fiction can simply shift distances or even shift narrators if doing so will accomplish a specific task for the book itself. 

In the case of the Harry Potter books, Rowling must open each one by bringing potentially naïve readers into a complex new world quickly enough to hold their interest but not so quickly that they become lost in the onslaught of new information that occurs in the first few pages.  Therefore she chooses to break from her usual narrative technique of using free indirect discourse within Harry’s point of view and instead begins each book from the perspective of a different Muggle.  In the first, fourth, and sixth book, the Muggle narrator appears as a character within the story who interacts with but does not understand the wizarding world.  In the other books in the series, the narration simply opens with descriptions that could be delivered by any person not initiated into the wizarding world but still self-aware enough to comment on the action of the story.  These two types of narrative shifts not only introduce the wizarding world through the perspective of outsiders, creating greater comfort for readers struggling to orient themselves in an invented universe, they also allow Rowling to comment quickly and directly on the characters and action so that the narrator can offer the reader an accurate impression of the characters before those characters first appear.  If the novels only used a single strict narrative form throughout, then they would be more difficult to understand and sympathize with at first, and most of their opening scenes would lose their current emotional impact. 

               

Works Cited

Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction, Second Edition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Print.

Card, Orson Scott. How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy. Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest, 1990.  Print.

Jauss, David. “From Long Shots to X-Rays: Distance and Point of View in Fiction.” On Writing Fiction: Rethinking Conventional Wisdom About the Craft. Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest, 2011.  PDF.

Wood, James.  “Narrating.”  How Fiction Works. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.  PDF.