Being an extract from the singular journal of JOHN M’ALISTER RAY, student of medicine

The words that introduce The Captain of the ‘Polestar’ by Arthur Conan Doyle

Narrative Design

E.M. Forster made the famous observation in Aspects of the Novel that the king died and then the queen died may be called a story, but when the king dies and then the queen dies of grief, well, now you have a plot because a causal connection has been made between the two events. However, what Forster didn’t say was how that tale should be told – from the perspective of the prince, a rival king in another land, or for that matter the court jester. And should the tale be told with the benefit of hindsight or as if it’s happening right now? Are the events to be presented as a first person narration, in the third person (what theorists call the assumed author), or even second person, where you the reader are directly addressed as an involved character? Another issue is whether the narrative be written in present or past tense or a mixture of both – or even, in extremely rare cases – future tense?

Then there’s the question of whether the tale is imparted exclusively through narrative description with occasional dialogue, or might the whole thing be told through letters or emails or even exclusively direct speech? All these are important questions, not least because the writer must come up with answers well ahead of any actual narrative composition and together these choices make up what is narrative design.

In The Captain of the ‘Polestar’ the journals of John M’Alister Ray are introduced at the top of the narrative by a person unnamed, and this is a technique I’ve used in The Strange Case of the Unaccountable Shadow, though their identity is revealed at the end. Diaries and journals that are found have the advantage from the very start that any outcome is possible. The fate of the ‘Polestar’ is always in doubt, because it may be that the journal of the ship’s young doctor was discovered years after that frozen ship became its crew’s grave. Another point is that supposedly original or official documents add a degree of authenticity to a tale.

Strictly speaking the epistolary form refers to those narratives written as letters (‘epistolary’ comes from the Latin epistula meaning ‘a written communication’). Nowadays, however, epistolary has come to mean a story presented through any form of first person record or communication, including letters, journals, diaries, emails or even WhatsApp messages. It’s letters that tell the tale, for example, in Rhoda Broughton’s The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth (1886) and William Fryer Harvey’s The Clock, though with the latter it’s as a single letter to a friend. F.G Loring’s The Tomb of Sarah (1900) is presented in diary form with a short paragraph of introduction.

As said, letters do sometimes play a narrative role in more standard ghost tales in that at the end of the tale they are often used as a way of revealing the back story of the ghost. For example, Amelia B. Edwards Was it an Illusion? (1881) and Bernard Capes’ An Eddy on the Floor (1899). It’s a structural device that works well in written fiction, but is less successful in movies, where audiences tend not to like too many explanations following the climax encounter.

Of course writers have many narrative design options open to them. Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Old Nurse’s Story (1852) is presented as a direct address to her young wards and is technically more a dramatic monologue than a literary first person narrative, though it is very long and the children listening would need to keep still for quite a while to hear it all. H.R. Wakefield’s The Nurse’s Tale is similar, except there are exchanges between the nurse and the children, but the important point is that both tales are presented exclusively in direct speech, without any outsider narrator description.

It’s worth before moving on that a relatively recent development in the ghost story is where the ghost is the first person narrator. This is the case with G.W. Stonier’s The Memoirs of a Ghost (1947), Jenn Ashworth’s Dinner for One (2014) and Louis de Bernières’ This Beautiful House (2009).

A popular narrative structure for a ghost story is the framing device of the story-within-a-story. The classic example of this is the armchair ghost tale told in front of a roaring fire after an evening meal, and you’ll find variations of this format in Francis Marion Crawford’s The Upper Berth (1894), Thomas Street Millington’s No Living Voice (1872), Mary Louisa Molesworth’s The Story of the Rippling Train (1887) and Perceval Landon’s Thurnley Abbey (1908). You might also add here Sheridan Le Fanu’s The Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street (1851), which talks of ‘a circle of intelligent and eager faces, lighted up by a good after-dinner fire on a winter’s evening, with a cold wind rising and wailing outside, and all snug and cosy within.’ The advantage of a story-within-a-story is that it offers an opportunity for those listening to comment on the tale, including whether or not it’s even true.

The veracity of a ghost story, and by association the storyteller, brings into play the idea of the ‘unreliable narrator’. The unreliable narrator is a concept much talked about in the literary world, but it has its problems, for it’s become a bit of a catch-all term that doesn’t distinguish between the narrator whose deliberate intention is to mislead and the narrator who is imperfectly informed or naively misinterprets what they see. The latter might more reasonably be called a ‘fallible narrator’, where fallibility can include naivety, reticence, insanity, overt moral censorship, and obtuseness.

The key point is that the reader’s evaluation and interpretation of events is usually at odds with the story teller. And it’s this which makes the unreliable/fallible narrator so popular in the literary world, for it’s this discrepancy between the way the narrator sees things and the likely perspective and perceptions of the reader, who suspects that something else is going on, that creates the irony in the narrative. The classic example in a ghost tale is Henry James’ The Turn Of The Screw (1898), where a doctor presents the journal of a governess who believes she see ghosts, yet whose tone of writing suggests paranoia is an equally likely explanation. As as often said, with Henry James, you’re always one remove from certainty. But isn’t that so often the case in life?

On the whole ghost stories keep to what you may call traditional narrative designs, be they epistolary, first person, third person or direct speech. A rare example of a multi-perspective narrative, with presentations of three different points of view (with the ghost communicating, as it were, through a medium), can be found in Ambrose Bierce’s The Moonlit Road (1907). It’s also worth mentioning Oliver Onions’ 1928 tale ‘John Gladwin Says…’, which is told from the point of view of one man, John Gladwin. What makes this tale so unusual is that it’s a non-linear series of scenes and what you realise at the end is that what is being described are the images inside the mind of a dying man whose life is passing before him.