After reading “The Body” by Stephen King, a fictional memoir of four pre-teens tromping off into the woods to find the dead body of a boy their age hit by a train, I was struck by how the narrator comes into the picture.
Gordie Lachance is grown up, professional writer looking back at this experience. On the one hand, he stays in the moment of his childhood, but then, at times, he swoops in and offers introspection, rumination, meaning from maturity and the distance between the current day and what he’s reflecting on.
It’s much like Ralphie in A Christmas Story or Nick Caraway in Gatsby.
The story element is very tight, very focused: Labor Day weekend for The Body, the Christmas season for Ralphie, and one summer for Caraway, and so when the narrator from the future pops in, he pops in to reflect on a very tight window.
I think of this a lot. How much should we stay in the moment and how much should we offer the reflection of the guy who made it out alive to tell the story. It’s a fine balance, but all three have this in common: the narrator from the future has a very light hand. He and it is a he in these three cases, largely stays in the timeline of the story, probably 75% of the time.
That’s a good number to aim for.