Third-person Point-of-view and the Interiority of Mood
Taysh Taylor on Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Tombs of Atuan
The Tombs of Atuan is told from a third-person perspective that closely follows the story of Tenar: a young girl deemed to be the reborn High Priestess of the Tombs of Atuan and fated to serve the Nameless Ones forever. Initially, I was disconcerted by the distance between the character and myself: the disembodied narrator gave me the sense I was only watching over rather than inhabiting Tenar.
What bridged that gap was the interiority of the mood: the realisation I was seeing the world as Tenar saw it.
In the prologue, the narrator refers to Tenar by her true name, as she is known by her family, but in the first chapter — surrounded by unfamiliar people — she is referred to as ‘the child’, adding to the sense of loneliness and estrangement. After Tenar is given to the dark powers, Manan, her jailor and friend, refers to her by her true name, yet the narrator still calls her ‘the child’. I understood then that Tenar was falling out of touch with herself — that her spirit was oppressed. It was after this revelation that I felt the narrator bring me in closer again.
As she grew older she lost all remembrance of her mother, without knowing she had lost it. She belonged here at the Place of the Tombs; she had always belonged here. Only sometimes in the long evenings of July as she watched the western mountains, dry and lion-coloured in the afterglow of sunset, she would think of a fire that burned on a hearth, long ago, with the same clear yellow light.
I sensed here the need to believe something untrue in an attempt to hold unrest at bay. Instead of leading me to distrust the narrator’s judgements, this observation of opposing things being simultaneously true allowed insight into the complexity of Tenar’s feelings.
Third-person objectivity used in tandem with subjective interiority is a powerful device. Le Guin planted within me an appreciation for the objective point-of-view. I encountered several instances where objectivity elicited a strong response.
“There is no way out,” she said, but took one step forward.
No movement. Was he dead? Was that all the strength he had in him? She sneered; her heart pounded. “Wizard!” she cried …’
Le Guin allows space for me to intuit that Tenar is grappling with two opposing natures. I experienced the highest of peaks of intimacy inside these moments of clarity — I could feel Le Guin’s deep caring for the story.
In his ‘memoir of the craft’, On Story, Stephen King famously comments on the telepathy of writing:
I didn’t tell you. You didn’t ask me. I never opened my mouth and you never opened yours. We’re not even in the same year together, let alone the same room … except we are together.
Before reading The Tombs of Atuan, I understood third-person as a point-of-view that would garner little intimacy. I defaulted to the first-person in fear of the distance that third- might create between the reader and myself. As the novel progressed, I experienced a subtle layering of complicated sympathies at play. They seemed to build and swell to a crescendo of comprehension and finally, I felt them laid upon one another into a combined realisation — telepathic messages exchanged between the author and me.
When she began the report, Taysh thought it would be a lie if she said she’d consider writing in third-person in the future … but: whaddya know!
