Every story makes a deal with you before it says a word about plot. The deal involves who is telling the story to you: a first person narrator who is inside the story, or a third-person narrator who is outside the story. In both cases, you never really “meet” the narrator per se. But when it is a third-person narrator, who we never really meet or see because he remains outside the story, there’s a difference.
One of the main differences is that when the narrator is first-person, he is a character inside the story, and thus, has motivations, characteristics, good and bad like all of us. Sometimes, he can even bend the story he is telling us. For example, in Farewell to Arms, the narrator is Lt. Henry, a character inside the story. Everything that happens has already happened, and Lt. Henry is telling us that story from his point of view. Like both types of narrators, we have to believe him if the story is to make sense. However, unlike the third-person narrator who is outside, Lt. Henry may not always be telling us the truth. While both narrators “shape” the story for us in their particular way, the first person narrator especially has to be watch carefully. In Lt. Henry’s case, he shoots a sergeant for not following orders and deserting, and yet he himself deserts. See what I mean?
In Boule de Suif, it is the third-person narrator who tells us the story. This narrator is not a character inside, but someone outside – omniscient, god-like, above everything talking to us. Like the first person narrator, this one shapes what he tells us and we have to believe what he says. However, unlike first person narrators, we can never really tell about this narrator if he is bending the truth. We have to believe everything, or the story will never make sense.
So, the narrator stands outside the events entirely, telling us who these ten travelers are, what they think, and how (sometimes why) they act as they do. You have to accept what he is telling you. So, when he tells you Monsieur Loiseau is “a cunning scoundrel,” you believe it. When he tells you the Comte and Comtesse de Breville represent “the moneyed, self-assured, solid element of society,” you have to believe that too. You have no other choice — if you doubt him, the whole story stops making sense.
But this narrator, like a first person narrator, also SHOWS you what these people do. In first person narration, a character can tell you something about another character and you can believe him; however, if later facts prove what he says wrong, that makes him unreliable. Third-person narrators are always reliable. They have to be for the story to make sense.
Third-person narration feels different than first person. It’s more godlike, even. The narrator tells you exactly what he wants you to know about “respectable” passengers before you ever watch them act: they are the moneyed, privileged folk, people “with a proper respect for religion and morality.” When narrators talk, we follow what they say and then balance that against their actions. That balance is what delivers your reliability judgment.
Already, before a single event has occurred in this story, the narrator has sorted ten people into two groups: the respectable, and everyone else. That’s not an accident. That’s the third-person narrator unfolding the story to us.
So before you read another page in any story, ask yourself these questions: first, is it first or third person narration. If it is first person, ask secondly: is this narrator reliable? If you answered third person to the initial question, sit back and enjoy the story. You have to believe everything or the story will not make sense.
In both types of narrators, you are here to learn how other people lead their lives, and how to lead yours. That is what classical literature does. And when you see what these characters do to Elisabeth, the main character in this story, remember: it is the third person narrator telling us all this. The power of classical literature is that it is language charged with meaning. And in this particular story, that meaning is a powerful statement of how peer pressure is not only so powerful, but that it can be used to humiliate another human being.
Read Boule de Suif with Jimmy, and find out exactly what I’m talking about.