A Matter of Perspective: The Importance of Who Tells a Story
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Nine months ago, when America seemed only slightly more coherent and a bit less unstable, I was in Greenville, South Carolina. I went with my significant other to visit family and friends for Thanksgiving. While visiting the city, we made our way towards the Reedy River, passing by the Peace Center as we did. On the wall of the adjacent building, just before the stairway that led down to where Larkin’s Catering and Events was located on the riverfront, a poster was plastered.
We stopped for a moment to look at the large poster. I can’t remember much of what the poster read, only that it was, as self-indicated by the blurb near the bottom, a parody of Hamilton.
Someone, likely my significant other, made a comment about Hamilton, about how they wish they could see it live with the original cast, how they listened to some of the songs and absolutely loved it, how they couldn’t believe how much a single ticket costed — a staggering $1,634 at the Broadway shows height, before Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator and actor who played Alexander Hamilton, announced he’d be leaving the production.
In the midst of the small talk between my significant other, her sister, her sister’s husband, I remained silent until I was assured, over and over, that I would love the show. Wasn’t I interested in seeing it at all?
The truth was, I had never even heard of Hamilton until that day. And when I announced that to the group, they fell into a silent shock.
On July 3, 2020, the broadway recording of Hamilton with the original cast was released for everyone’s viewing pleasure one day shy of Independence Day, a holiday that felt wrong to recognize this year amid all the ongoing injustice across the United States.
After the two hours and forty minutes spent watching the show via Disney+, I found myself elated, moved by the performances, and the experience of emotions and passion. It was raw; it was real. But it also had something else that many television shows and movies usually can’t achieve: an effective narrator.
It comes through in how the story of Alexander Hamilton is told, which isn’t directly by Alexander Hamilton. It’s delivered through the monologues of Aaron Burr, the man who inevitably — spoiler alert for those who don’t remember or know the history — kills Alexander Hamilton. It’s a story told about one character from the perspective of another, secondary character, who, in turn, becomes a primary character.
The choice Lin-Manuel Miranda made by having Aaron Burr be both actor and narrator is one that leans into his assertion made during the commencement speech he gave at University of Pennsylvania back in 2016: “...every story you choose to tell, by necessity, omits others from the narrative.”
Miranda choses to focus on the relationships between Alexander Hamilton and people like Marquis de Lafayette, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, the Schuyler sisters and Aaron Burr to help the audience better understand who Hamilton was and what his motivations were. And by having Aaron Burr be the main perspective through which the audience views Hamilton, and it shows the development of Burr’s character, or lack thereof. In a way, it’s like viewing the negative space of a photograph. We’re seeing what is there in Hamilton’s life and what isn’t there in Burr’s life, learning of his inner desires while merely witnessing what Hamilton does and how he acts.
This method of storytelling is nothing new, either. A similar perspective is used in The Great Gatsby. Nick Caraway, in his writing about Jay Gatsby, becomes the vehicle for the story of Gatsby to be told through. And through Gatsby's story, we learn more about Nick’s wants and desires as we follow him following Gatsby around New York. In turn, we also learn about Tom Buchannan, Daisy Buchannan, Jordan Baker, and George and Myrtle Wilson, among the cast of characters.
It’s a wonderful form of storytelling that allows the chosen secondary character (the narrator) to be in the room, watching the primary character (the story) act and interact without getting too close to them, which results in a loss of clarity and perspective.
How different The Great Gatsby would be if Fitzgerald decided to tell the story from Jay Gatsby’s perspective? How would that change the focus of the narrative, the pacing of the story? It may have been a more deeply meditative novel with countless scenes of Gatsby sitting at the end of the pier, ruminating about his past, how he could’ve done things differently, all the while yearning for the green light across the water. It could be a much shorter, more fast pace read, with far more distortion and gaps in the narrative. There are a number of ways it could be different, and it might not have been heralded as the great American novel.
And how different would Hamilton be is Miranda told it from the titular character’s perspective? As much focus as Miranda puts on how vigorously Hamilton wrote, I doubt it would be as encompassing as it is told by Burr, who was always watching and waiting to make a move.
Deciding on the narrator is just as important, if not more important in some cases, as to deciding what point of view the story will be told in. Before deciding if it’ll be told in first, second, or third person, it’s beneficial to know who is telling the story. That will largely dictate which point of view is most useful.
In his 2013 essay, “Once Upon a Time, There Was a Person Who Said, ‘Once Upon a Time’,” Steve Almond points out how, ten years prior, the work his creative writing students were handing over to him back in 2003, work he described as “a particular species of student story.”
New writers tend to mimic the forms of storytelling they’re most often exposed to. For many, that’s television and film. The progression of a story they know best is one through the character actions and camerawork rather than a traditional narrator. This exposure tends to heightened the commitment to the idea of “show don’t tell.”
Many of Almond’s students during that time were mimicking the narrative structure of Momento, a movie that tells its story through incoherence and the continual struggle by the main character, Leonard Shelby, to make sense of his life. When critiquing these students who mimicked this form of storytelling in fiction, he noted that though the pieces were ambitious, they all lacked one key element: an effective narrator.
Eventually, after finally watching the film his student’s so ardently mimicked, Almond felt he understood better why his student’s kept writing such stories. And after making the comment to his students to read more and watch less, this is what he was met with:
“Instead, they wrote me stories based on Momento, earnest sagas that told me, in tender defiance of their disarray, the they were, in fact, unsure how they arrived in such a precarious place, and uncertain even how to tell the story that might make sense of their journey.”
It’s difficult deciding on how a story will be told, and more difficult yet to decide who should tell it. There’s no trick to make that easier; it takes trial and error until a character sticks or a voice stands out. Sometimes, to better understand this, it takes stepping back from the medium we’re so involved in and looking elsewhere for inspiration.
Five years after Hamilton’s rapturous Broadway debut, I sat down and watched the musical with no intent other than to enjoy the phenomenon. And in doing so, I was reminded of why we tell stories and the importance of who gets to tell it.
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About Coty Poynter
Coty Poynter is the author of two poetry books. His most recent, Delirium: Collected Poems, was published by Bowen Press. His work has appeared in Black Fox Literary Magazine, Equinox, Grub Street, and Underwood Press. He lives in Baltimore with his partner, their cat Pudge, and a hodgepodge of plants.
