It’s raining. It’s gloomy and grim and chilly out, with a Seattlesque drizzle coming down.

I love it.

I fully expect to have a blizzard before the month is over, though. That’s just the kind of dame March is.

I’m reading a very good mystery right now (I’ll tell you about it when I’m done), and as I thought it over, driving home, I was hit with the question, “What exactly is supposed to be going on in a first-person-narrative novel?”

I’m not asking about what’s going on in the plot of the story. I’m asking, how am I supposed to understand the narrator in relation to me as a reader?

I mean, think about it. You’ve got this (imaginary) person, who usually makes no claims to being a writer, who is nevertheless pouring out this carefully constructed, professionally polished (or so one hopes) narrative. In the narrator’s own alternate universe, how did this manuscript come to be?

Sometimes it’s made clear. The very earliest English novels, like Pamela and Joseph Andrews, were generally presented as collections of letters, “epistolary novels.” The authors were concerned with the problem of how the reader was to understand the origin of what they were reading, and so put the stories in that “believable” form.

But eventually authors realized that readers will swallow quite a lot of improbability in narration. You can write a story where the narrator dies at the very end of the story, with no possible chance of composing a book about his experiences, and the reader will still generally buy it.

Another strategy is to have the narrator address the reader, saying in effect, “I am the author. I wrote this story from my own experience and I present it to you.” Conan Doyle’s Dr. Watson used to speak matter-of-factly of writing down the adventures of his friend Sherlock Holmes, and getting them published.

This works too, even when the narrator doesn’t seem to be the kind of person who’d be likely to write a lengthy narrative. Remember Huckleberry Finn? “If I’d known it was so much trouble to make a book, I’d have never started.” (Quotation from memory. Probably wrong. I find, to my embarrassment, that I don’t have a copy of H.F. in the house.)

But even if we buy it (and we generally do, under the provisions of the Willing Suspension of Disbelief Act), what do we really think the narrator is doing? Do we actually think the semiliterate Huck Finn went to the trouble of “making a book?” Do we think Travis McGee sat down between cases and composed color-coded narratives about his cases? He described his houseboat, “The Busted Flush,” pretty comprehensively, and I don’t remember him even mentioning a typewriter. Just doesn’t seem like the kind of thing old Trav would have owned. (By the way, it just occurred to me that the author John D. MacDonald spelled his name with an “a” between the “M” and the “c,” while his character Travis McGee lacked the “a.” Probably an author’s strategy for saving typewriter ribbon.)

So to whom is the first-person narrator speaking in his alternate world?

I think that, in a sense, he’s talking to God.

It seems to me we have no trouble believing such narratives because we know that, in our own hearts, there is a story we’re desperate to tell. A story we’ve been composing all our lives.

Remember Orual in C. S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces? Remember how she spent her whole life composing a complaint she could raise in her own defense, when she finally stood face to face with the gods?

I think Lewis was recognizing a universal human phenomenon there.

Unless otherwise indicated, then, I like to think the first-person narrator is delivering his summation at the Last Judgment. Another form of narration is called “The Omniscient Narrator.” But there’s an Omniscient Reader too.