Part 3 : Introduction of a Character using Direct Address to the Reader.
In this method the character directly address the reader.
Three well known books that use this method are: Moby Dick, The Great Gadsby and Huckleberry Finn.
Here is an example from Kate Christensen’s The Epicure’s Lament:
All the lonely people indeed. Whoever they are, I’ve never been one of them. The lack of other people is a balm. It’s the absence of strain and stress. I understand monks and hermits, anyone who takes a vow of silence or lives in a far-flung cave. And I hoped to live this way for the rest of my life, whatever time is left to me. (p. 3)
Notice that this passages tells the reader the character is literate and educated; he prefers his own company to others; he harbours an active hostility to other people; and he is a fatalist.
The strength in this kind of introduction lies within the first person narrative; we’re hearing an individual tell us their stories in a way that only they can describe. Even though we don’t know what they look like or what they are doing, we know we are in direct contact with a unique individual and are already aware of some of their most intimate thoughts.
Now its your turn. Write your character introduction using this method and post it in the comments section below.
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Introduction of a Character using Direct Address to the Reader: Conrad Rhienhart
It is thirty-two below zero tonight in Stalingrad on New Years Eve in 1942. I think your pastor lied when he preached that Lucifer’s Hell was fire and brimstone because I know for certain it is not; it is a world of rime, rubble, rats; the fallen angle haunts the souls and shadows here.
It is so cold today the Russians snippers didn’t turn in for work. Only a battered and brown rusted-out fire pot radiates hollow warmth. I pray, reader, that your children may never be faced with man’s inhumanity.
Here, all is froze over; while, no doubt, you can leaf-through this tale reclining by a snug stove or hearth, or read it fifty years from now cradled in the hot sand of a golden beach in balmy July.
Here, my pork rations are hard as granite; our ersatz coffee solid and still like a brown winter pond; and the company’s latrine is heaped high with one-hundred thousand frozen turds from the survivors of Paulus’ sixth infantry; the glorious Wehrmacht in frozen pyramids below and above in Hell’s caldron. The freezing temperatures furnish one singular reward: not a whiff of body-rot laces the air.
All is still.
As I stoop upon a burnt-out VW Kubelwagan, only my infernal hate of this god-forsaken wasteland sears me from inside-out. Wounded, I gaze out upon a silent sea of corpses; a sea of mothers’ and fathers’ beautiful sons. They are strewn about in the snowy dust of debris, rat-gnawed, grey-ashened and dead-eyed; spectral.
Why did the Fuher meddle with this squalorous east. Why did he borrow the trouble and the degradation of the Russian horde.
I see a broken looking-glass leaning against a crumbling wall and am reminded of how hot and dry my eyes are from fatigue and I wonder how I must look after yesterday’s counter-attack; no longer handsome, that is certain – not with this monstrous scar, the missing eye and mangled leg.
Would you believe I had committed to die here with my comrades so that our Germanic blood might spread out to cover and conquer the mediocre masses and to achieve mankind’s pinnacle. No retreat and no surrender.
The only two option: victory or death.
But now evacuation westward to Germany is my future. Ah, the west. It’s a dream to all here in this unholy east.
And what would I give for a warm mattress in Achern while contently reading Plato or Goethe or to stroll the rows between the vines of our farm in the fresh and steamy mornings of late summer ensconced in the fragrant plumed air or to recline on the hillside amongst the August sere with my Adie in the afternoon, sipping a fine Spatburgunder, getting warmly drunk while watching the boats and barges drift sweetly down the soft Rhine, untroubled in the world; surrounded by God’s warm golden-white heaven instead of man’s cold pale-gray ideological hell.
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