Mitchell's Narration
This story really has two different narrators. The bulk of the story is comprised of dialogue in which Mitchell offer a running recollection of the events of a singularly unusual night in the recent past. At the same time that he is relating this story which has already happened, he is occasionally interjecting commentary on things which are happening in the present—during the time period in which he is telling his story. From the perspective of imagery, Mitchell’s narration is idiosyncratic from the perspective that he is relating an event which essentially consists of people behaving in extreme ways due to a heightened emotional state yet his actual description is delivered as if he were describing any random night in his life from the past year. In other words, his tale features fainting girls, screaming women, crying men, the revelation that a former sweetheart he hasn’t seen in eight years still have feelings for him and people arriving from all around the community to see the man who came back from the dead. While the latter, of course, was just a short-term misunderstanding, taken collectively, this story cries out for narration that goes beyond mere just-the-facts reportage. And yet, that is precisely how his fantastic tale is told.
The Narrator's Narration
Considering that the overwhelming bulk of the story consists of Mitchell delivering essentially a monologue, it would seem to be a story perfectly constructed for a first-person approach. And yet, Lawson decides against that and inserts a narrator describing the things going on that Mitchell doesn’t. But that’s not the weird part. The third person narration which encompasses and surrounds Mitchell’s monologue is entirely observational and resolutely avoids making any kind of direct external commentary or opinion or attempt to portray what cannot be seen. And guess what? That’s still not the weird part. The weird part is that the third person observation narrator adopts almost exactly the same flat approach language, studiously avoiding not just poetic metaphor, but even avoiding the occasional lapse into conservational slang which is Mitchell’s only submission to dry reportage of the facts. So if Mitchell’s manner of narrating his story within the story and the narrator’s manner of narrating the story itself are almost completely identical, why does the author even bother? Why did he not just make it a first person story told entirely by Mitchell?
Mitchell's Conversational Approach
Even though he could easily be forgiven for interjecting a bit more florid prose in his account of fainting girls, weeping fathers, screaming mothers and a huge misunderstanding about the stage of his own mortality, the closest that Mitchell ever gets to dressing up the language he uses to tell that story to his traveling companion is to characterize the man who falsely claimed he was dead a “blundering fool” and to question whether “the old cove had gone off his chump” in regard to the way his crying father seemed to be acting like he’d lost his mind. These and other elements related to the story being told rather than written serve to make Mitchell’s the teller of a tale rather than the writer of one. His conversational approach is designed to remind the reader that he is also just as much an audience for Mitchell’s story as the mate out there with him on the edge of the plain. As such, his story lacks the design and attention to necessary detail that would be required in a first-person account which by definition creates an assumption on the reader’s part that what he is reading has been written down with some amount of care. The conversational tone of Mitchell’s story allows him to stay entirely within that story and only make an occasional digression when something taking place in the present so fascinates him that he feels compelled to commentary.
The Narrator's Indirect Approach to Commentary
You may recall that earlier the assertion was made that the third-person observational narrator refrains from making “any kind of direct external commentary” on Mitchell or his story. He does not feel the same compunction to refrain from making indirect external commentary and it is precisely this commentary which is the answer to the question posed before: why not just have Mitchell tell the entire story in the first person? The precise answer can be found here:
“Here he took a pull at his water-bag.
He lit his pipe.
He put his hat down on the ground, dinted in the crown, and poured some water into the hollow for his cattle-pup.
He poured a drop more water into the top of his hat.
He cut up some more tobacco.”
None of these acts are so vital to what Mitchell is doing as he is recollecting his story that he could be expected to step outside that conversation simply for the purpose of keeping is reader aware of what is actually taking place in the present as he relates the more important story from the past. And yet, they are actually quite essential for the reader to know. Since the third-person narrator has made the decision not to enter into Mitchell’s mind to tell us what he’s thinking as he tells his story, the only way to get any possible idea is show us what he is doing as he tells the story. And what is doing? Taking care of the everyday little necessities required to live the life he has chosen to live without making any of it a fanfare. His actions are every bit as prosaic and mundane as the manner in which he describes the actions taking place in his story that anything but prosaic and mundane. By choosing to use a dual narrative approach, Lawson succeeds in providing all the information we need to know that for Mitchell, his seeming resurrection from the grave was not worthy of the extreme emotional response it elicited from his family. And since that it is the case, he would never in a million years commit to paper; it is a story to be told as the urge suits him. More to the point; it is a story that for him does not even create the level of excitement in the telling that a dog slurping up his weight in water holds.
