On Writing: Opening Lines

 History Through Fiction has three articles on openings. When I undertook to study writing while in prison, I started paying attention to openings. The first line should get one to read the second, and so on until the last sentence. I do not say I have so many good openings, only that this is important. 

As to the articles in question:

Famous Novel Openings Explained: Moby Dick :

 “Call me Ishmael.”

Which seems to be one opening line that is used as an example for this type of discussion (others I would include: Pride and Prejudice and Anna Karenina.). When I first read the novel in my early twenties, I liked the opening line as a hearty welcoming. Maybe I was not as knowledgeable about the Bible as I ought to have been, for Ishmael has its own meaning:

The opening line is significant for many reasons, but the most overt of these is the name, Ishmael. This is a reference to an important figure within the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. Melville, who was raised as an orthodox Calvinist, would have known the name from the biblical Book of Genesis, although the character is also present in the Torah and the Qur’an. In Genesis, Ishmael is Abraham’s illegitimate son, whom he fathered through his wife’s servant, Hagar. As the biblical story goes, Hagar runs away after being mistreated by Abraham’s wife. In the wilderness, she encounters an angel who informs her of her pregnancy and tells her, “[thou] shalt call his name Ishmael; because the Lord hath heard thy affliction.” Call him Ishmael. Because God has heard your suffering.   

The speaker in the opening line of Moby Dick uses similar language in his statement, “Call me Ishmael.” Note how he never actually says his name is Ishmael, but simply asks the audience to call him by that name. It may be his name, or it may not be. Or, he may be using it as an expression to preface the story with an understanding that we’re calling him Ishmael because God heard his suffering and somehow responded (as in the case of the biblical Ishmael). Whatever the case, it appears Melville intended for it to be ambiguous

The second article is Pride and Prejudice (see what I mean?): 

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

I did not read Austen until prison (yes, the prison's leisure library had a full collection of Jane Austen; no, I have no idea why). My reading was that the opening's syntax set the book's tone, while its words summarized the theme/plot. The article goes further, and I think do so rightly, with the following:

The story’s opening line is important because it presents the novel as one designed to confront problematic rules regarding courtship and marriage. Austen uses the revolutionary language of her day, “a truth universally acknowledged,” to mock the English societal structure that viewed marriage as an economic issue rather than an issue of love and well-being. (Note how similar her diction is to that of contemporary revolutionary documents, such as “we hold these truths to be self-evident,” from the U.S. Declaration of Independence.)

Austen’s word choice in this line highlights the lack of reason behind the ideologies guiding the social structures of her time. Unlike the revolutionary philosophies of the era, social traditions such as class systems and marriage contracts were seemingly void of reason: If a man has a fortune, he must want a wife. The logical deduction here is comically weak, as there is no evidence to prove a correlation between the two issues of possessing a fortune and wanting to get married. Such a statement, then, seems to say if the logic is flawed, perhaps the system is too.

The theme for me was that a man with a fortune was not a man but a fortune to be pursued by women who had no other means of a safe economic life; the lead characters would not have it so.

The last article covered a novel that I did not learn of until prison, think most highly of, and since this is Black History month, suggest everyone read it: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. 

“I am an invisible man.”

From Famous Novel Openings Explained: Invisible Man:

Invisible Man opens with the sardonic voice of a nameless protagonist who has spent years underground recovering from the emotional, psychological, and physical turmoil he’d endured while trying to fit into American society. The society that had burned and berated him, used him, kept him running on an endless hamster wheel of unmet expectations, and never once acknowledged him as a unique and important soul. Further in the opening, he says, “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”

With Louis Armstrong’s blues spinning on a record in the background, the speaker tells the story of his efforts to fit himself into a world of black and white definitions, of dos and don’ts, and of rights and wrongs in terms of socio-cultural rules. Yet it becomes apparent that in striving to become what everyone wants him to be, the speaker’s own sense of self diminishes and disappears. No one sees him—that is, he is invisible—because what people see in him is nothing but their own projections of what they presume to see. Even he can’t view himself without their opinions blurring his vision.  

Thus, the speaker’s statement, “I am an invisible man,” serves to preface every interaction he has with the characters in the story, all of whom have standards and expectations for how he should behave. After defining himself by others’ strict black and white, absolutist rules throughout the majority of the novel, he later discovers that his personhood, and the world at large, consists not only of innumerous shades of grey, but also of unimaginable colors and lights and unique distinctions. By the end of the story, he determines that he was never intended to fit into the confines of a personhood constructed for him by a factitious social order. And because of this awareness, his invisibility is then able to transform into something beautiful—a blank slate that he can fill however he chooses. Freedom to define himself in his own way.

 When I read this, I heard an echo of Moby-Dick. For me, they share the same forthrightness. Ellison also states his theme, and the novel expounds on that theme.

Read and learn - and write!

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