Point of View and Distance in Rara Avis by T.C. Boyle

David Jauss' essay, "From Long Shots To X-Rays" brought me back to my constant struggle with voice. And as my latest story is a retrospective first person narrative, I was interested in what he was saying about that choice. I have taken the traditional close first person approach. My protagonist is my narrator and she is looking back in time at events that have taken place. There is not much time distance between protagonist as actor and protagonist as storyteller, she is an adult, mother, wife in both. She does not exhibit any reflection, demonstrate any growth or change in character as the protagonist actor approaches the age of protagonist narrator. Jauss suggests that there is a range of distance available to a writer in a story within a viewpoint, and that use of multiple distances actually contributes to the story.

T. Coraghessan Boyle's story "Rara Avis", is a short jam-packed example of the protagonist narrator telling a retrospective story. Boyle, however, moves his omniscience around in a way that I have not done within my own story. I'm going to examine what this does to the distance between the reader and the protagonist.

The story starts at a great distance, pretending almost to be third person for the first three sentences which describe the bird on the roof of the furniture store. It isn't until the fourth sentence that the first person plural kicks in.

"We stood, thirty or forty of us, gaping up at the big motionless bird," (p. 106) And then adult narrator puts himself in place, and the reader alongside.

"I was twelve."(p.106) There is a distance between the adult narrator and the child the narrator was, and this is most strongly indicated by Boyle's choice of language. The story is told in the adult narrator's language throughout. The bird is recognizable as a woman or girl (an association reflecting the child narrator as an adolescent). And at first the boy cannot see the bird on the roof, until he comes around the store. Here the reader is limited to only the boy's sight so that we can experience the moment with him. "Then, I looked up." (p. 107)

Boyle then plays with point of view as the boy describes the collection of onlookers and where they come from and what they were doing before they arrived. It is the wide angle lens, seen as if from the bird's point of view on the roof but told by the adult narrator.The community coming together to look at the strange bird.
Clearly, the child narrator would not have been able to see and relay all that detail while looking up at the strange bird. And even the adult narrator is not remembering, but creating a scene based on his omniscient knowledge of all those individuals. Boyle then returns to the limited perspective of the boy.

"I glanced up and saw my father in the back of the crowd standing close to Mrs. Schlecta and whispering something in her ear. Her lips were wet. I didn't know where my mother was." The adult narrator and child narrator are tightly aligned now, because surely in the time that has passed he would have gained knowledge about where his mother was on that remarkable day. He also doesn't say "I don't know where my mother was." The adult narrator doesn't separate from the child in not knowing.

When the child narrator recounts the fire of six weeks earlier, the reader is again limited to what the child physically observed,( "I caught a glimpse of Janine." and "Wayne Sanders was white-faced.") and thoughts.

"I knew what they wanted to know. It was the same thing that my father demanded of me whenever he caught me—in fact or by report—emerging from the deserted, vandalized and crumbling house; What were you doing in there?

He couldn't know." (p. 108)

He goes to confession, and lies about his self pollution. Here the adult narrator and the child separate slightly so that the adult can observe that the words were "formal and unfamiliar".

The final section of the account returns to the bird, but it is later in the day, and we do not return to the wide angle lens. The viewpoint of the child narrator is limited.

"When I looked around again there were only eight of us left, six kids and two men I didn't recognize." The adult narrator doesn't explain or even conjecture about the men's existence.
So the adult and the boy and the reader are all in complete darkness together about the strangers. Fully united in our collective ignorance.

Again Boyle takes us from child narrator observing to child narrator thinking. "I wanted the bird to flap its wings, blink an eye, shift a foot; I wanted it desperately, wanted it more than anything I had ever wanted. Perched there at the lip of the roof, its feet clutching the drainpipe as if welded to it, the bird was a coil of possibility, a muscle relaxed against the moment of tension. Yes it was magnificent even in repose. And, yes, I could stare at it, examine it's every line, from it's knobbed knees to the cropped feathers at the back of it's head. I could absorb it, become it, look out from it's blinking yellow eyes on the street grown quiet and the sun sinking behind the gas station." (p.109) As the circle of the story has come around, the child is once again able to see beyond his own sight, he has become the bird, has returned to the omniscient viewpoint from the roof.

And then Boyle kicks the reader out of the story.

"It was then I understood. Secret, raw, red, and wet, the wound flashed just above the juncture of the legs before the wind died and the feathers fell back into place." (p. 109) The narrator and the child know something the reader is not privy to. If you were sitting with the adult narrator, you would be asking "what, what, what was the wound?" But it is a secret kept from the reader, something not to be known, like what happens in abandoned buildings, and where his mother is when Mrs. Schlecta has wet lips. And what kind of bird was it?

"I caught their eyes: they'd seen it too."(p.109) The strangers are suddenly given a point of view. Not "I knew they'd" seen it too, but they had. A statement of fact. The strangers, the adult narrator and the child all know what the reader does not. The knowledge is so important, that it changes the child, moving him from wanting to be the bird to wanting to kill it.

So Boyle sets up the reader.  Because the outset is so distant that the reader trusts that s/he will understand something that the child in the story does not. And yet, by the time the story completes, the adult narrator and child narrator are complicit in a mystery the reader doesn't understand. Betrayed!