5 Principles for Using Multiple Narrators in Your Novel
Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859) may be the first modern novel to use multiple narrators. The fact that it’s a mystery and legal thriller is no coincidence. As its introduction explains, the story is “told by more than one pen, as the story of an offence against the laws is told in Court by more than one witness.”
(Writing Multiple Timelines and Points of View.)
In what has long since become conventional wisdom among novelists and novel readers, Collins suggests that the truth of any social experience can’t emerge from the testimony of a single voice and POV but requires the diversity of many. Of course, anyone who’s ever served on a jury knows that many witnesses can lead not to truth but to incoherence.
The novelist using multiple narrators faces the same challenges but also the same opportunities—of conflict, surprise, irony, and paradox, as well as an ultimate sense of unity. Multiple narrators allow a story, whatever its subject, to unfold like a dazzling courtroom drama.
My debut novel, Disorderly Men (2023), concerns three men arrested in the police raid of a Greenwich Village gay bar in 1962 and alternates between chapters narrated in close third-person POV for each protagonist. Roger is a closeted, married banker; Julian, a relatively uncloseted literature professor; and Danny, a grocery clerk rejected by his family. To be sure, my novel isn’t strictly-speaking a mystery and boasts only one brief courtroom scene, but writing it (and then rewriting it repeatedly) taught me five principles that can make multiple narrators a powerful literary tool.
Each narrator should be unique
Whereas a single omniscient third-person narrator might employ a roving close POV on a variety of characters, multiple narrators—whether in first-person, second- or third-, whether omniscient or limited—must be as unique as those characters. If not, they’ll either betray the voice of the author or create readerly confusion.
We often use the terms “voice” and “POV” interchangeably, but in literal terms voice is what narrators sound like; POV is what and how they see. Both are essential to shaping a narrator’s distinctiveness.
In Disorderly Men, Roger’s narrator, like Roger himself, speaks in a voice that is curt and clipped but longs for elaboration. He tends to notice whatever aids or threatens Roger. The voice of Julian’s narrator is arch and ironic; elaboration is its wheelhouse. Danny’s narrator’s voice is cool and sarcastic, tinged with fantasy and camp. He notices whatever gives pleasure.
In choosing a random line from any novel with effective multiple narrators, it ought to be fairly easy to discern, simply by the diction, metaphors, cadence, and habits of noticing, which narrator is telling the story.
Diversity should reflect community
Unique narrators should still represent the cohesion of a particular group, however small or loosely related. Even a pair or trio of narrators must have some recognizable connection to one another or constitute a unit—a relationship, a shared set of circumstances, or a community.
Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (2016) is told by four narrators: a South Korean woman who becomes a vegetarian, her husband, her brother-in-law, and her sister. In Robert Jones Jr.’s The Prophets (2022), a variety of narrators defines the culture of an antebellum Mississippi cotton plantation and the African past of its enslaved laborers. Even in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), the relentless shifting of multiple narrators constructs a specific network of 20th- and 21st-century bicoastal strivers in the fields of music, media, and technology. Each novel depends on “more than one witness” to yield its collective truth.
In Disorderly Men, my narrators attempt to represent through their differences the collective truth of (cis white male) queer experience in mid-century Manhattan. Shifting from Roger’s narrator to Julian’s and then to Danny’s, we see a range of experiences and beliefs, the clash of status and class, of competing sexual styles, regimes of compromise, and tactics of satisfaction and survival. Although they don’t represent the whole of queer life in early ‘60s New York City—secondary characters offer lesbian, Puerto Rican, Black, and Jewish perspectives—their collaboration approximates the coherence of an inchoate community.
By contrast, the first-person POV of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956) perfectly suits the tragedy of David’s brooding self-isolation. But because the queer men in my novel find themselves only by finding each other, multiple narrators were essential.
Check out Edward Cahill’s Disorderly Men here:
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Multiplicity enables revision, irony, and complexity
When narrators experience the same people, events, objects, and actions from different perspectives, readers benefit from the illumination of revision. Interacting characters, of course, can shape one another’s experiences; but multiple narrators can produce new interpretations of things for us as authors. Opportunities for dramatic irony and multidimensionality abound.
Roger, Julian, and Danny each experience the police raid differently, which both characterizes them and yields a more complex representation of the event. Subsequently, Julian’s confidence seems a kind of arrogance in Roger’s eyes, but gradually becomes a model of courage; in Julian’s eyes, Roger’s stoicism looks more like timidity until it becomes a painful source of self-recognition. When Danny eventually meets Julian, we discover in one chapter the former’s anti-elitism and, in another, the latter’s compassion.
An important caution: The presentation of conflicting interpretations of the same event—sometimes called the “Rashomon effect” after Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film about a murder and the testimony of four unreliable witnesses—can, like Collins’s Woman in White, produce a compelling tale of subjectivity and ambiguity. But novelists pursuing this approach should avoid excessive repetition, which can slow narrative momentum and turn a thrilling moment into a tedious fixation.
Transitions can be especially powerful
In the first lines or paragraphs of a new narrator’s chapter, the articulation of a unique verbal or observational style should manifest a new order of being, even in the same setting or situation. It claims an implicitly adversarial relation to whatever order has preceded it, but it also reminds us that each narrator has only a provisional relationship to the totality of the novel’s story.
The regular exchange of narrators in Disorderly Men begins in uncertainty but soon coalesces into a kind of conversation. But with less regular schemes, the uncertainty might persist to great effect. Narrators might appear unexpectedly or in unexpected patterns, repeatedly or only once. They might even ask readers to struggle a bit to determine whose POV they’re reading. In Egan’s Goon Squad, the appearance of un-introduced narrators makes their discernment essential to the experience of the plot.
Coherence can arise from fragmentation
One of the pleasures of Goon Squad is discovering an elaborate network of affiliation (symbolic, thematic, etc.) amidst its numerous and often tangentially-related narrators. Such connections can produce a feeling of structure that might otherwise appear to be lacking. But any number of multiple narrators can effectively wink at their mutual relation.
In separate chapters of Disorderly Men, for example, both Danny’s and Julian’s narrators separately observe subway beer posters featuring “Miss Rheingold.” Likewise, all three of my narrators are specifically focused on the gendered symbolism of houses and homes. Both connections nod to the force of compulsory heterosexuality but also remind readers that this series of narrators is superintended by a creative force larger than themselves.
Thus, Collins’s courtroom of narrative multiplicity is really only a metaphor. In an actual courtroom, although a judge guides the proceedings and regulates the testimony of witnesses, there is finally no controlling author. With a single narrator, the author often disappears behind the screen of fiction. But multiple narrators subtly imply the authorial mind—not the voice but the intelligence—that brought them into being, repeatedly manifesting its power to command both speech and silence.
In doing so, they signal the unifying intention behind the diversity of narrators, the boundedness of the story’s perspectival abundance, and the confidence we might have that, despite so many witnesses giving testimony, what we’re really hearing is something more like a chorus.