Showing the Way
In Toni Morrison’s essay “Site of Memory,” she explains her creation of the third-person point of view in her fiction. She crafts the narrator as a guide. She states:
Morrison’s articulation of a guide is significant. The guide can take on multiple points of view, move the narrative, and does not (in an overt way) reveal itself or its itinerary. This aspect of the guide function is important to the narrative construction of Rendezvous Eighteenth. On one hand, the narrator appears to guide the reader using the conventions of detective fiction. On the other hand, the narrator guides the reader through Ricky’s “interior dialogue,” which points to the construction of a love story.So you have this sort of guide. But that guide can’t have a personality; it can only have a sound and you have to feel comfortable with this voice, and then this voice can easily abandon itself and reveal the interior dialogue of a character. So it’s a combination of using the point of view of various characters but still retaining the power to slide in and out, provided that when I’m “out” the reader doesn’t see little fingers pointing to what’s in the text. (78)
Ricky's interior dialogue and Morrison's statement about the narrator as guide may be better understood (in terms of narrative structure and reader perception) in conjunction with Gérard Genette's statement on narrative competence. In Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, Genette states:
We must consider the possible (or rather the variable) narrative competence of the reader, arising from practice, which enables him both to decipher more and more quickly the narrative code in general or the code appropriate to a particular genre or a particular work, and also to identify the "seeds" when they appear. […]. Moreover, this very competence is what the author relies on to tool the reader by sometimes offering him false advance mentions, or snares—well known to connoisseurs of detective stories. (76-7)
With this said, I offer that Lamar’s Rendezvous Eighteenth may not meet the expectations of detective fiction readers of a certain competence because Lamar crafts snares for the reader. In particular, I suggest that readers may notice Lamar’s narrator offering two routes or codes for reading—detective fiction and romance. The “seeds” of romance are discernible through the characters’ motivations that is Ricky's interior dialogue.