Storystorm

I tend to avoid the first person when I write fiction. I get bogged down by questions like, “Why is this character telling this story?” and “Who is she telling the story to?” When I find the answer to both of these questions to be “I don't know,” I scrap the first person and switch to the third.But in Anthony Doerr's “The River Nemunas,” a story told from the perspective of Allison, a fifteen-year-old girl navigating her parents' death and her move to Lithuania to live with her grandfather (her only surviving relative), the use of the first person serves a purpose. Above all, Allison's story is one of grief and loss. From the first page we see visible in Allison's language that she is trying to hold in her emotions, trying to prevent passing of time, which will inevitably move her farther away from her parents: “We merge onto a four-lane divided highway. The land on both sides is broken into pastures that look awfully muddy for early July. It starts to rain. The Peugeot has no windshield wipers”¦ Lithuania turns a steamy green. Grandpa Z drives with his head out the window.” Riddled with simple syntax, unemotional language, and specific diction, Allison's voice mirrors her internal state. Like the land, her family has been “broken” and “divided” with the death of her parents, and like her restrained sentences, she steels herself against her own grief. Allison tries her best to hold back her emotions, but eventually cracks. Her narrative breaks into an emotional appeal, confronting the reader with how hard she has been trying to hold everything in: "You want to know? What it's like? To prop up the dam? To keep your fingers plugged in its cracks? To feel like every single breath that passes is another betrayal, another step farther away from what you were and where you were and who you were, another step deeper into the darkness?"The only way to not betray her parents, it seems, is to not forget them. And the only way to not forget them is to stop time, to stay still, and to not acknowledge her feelings.With little to do in Lithuania, Allison befriends a neighbor whose stories of Allison's mother as a little girl fishing on the River Nemunas compel her to do the same. Unbeknownst to her, the river acts as a source of instruction for Allison, demonstrating to her the impermanence of life. As opposed to Allison, the river is in constant motion, “glid[ing] past” and “slip[ping] along” and “pour[ing] on and on.” The more time Allison spends on the river, the more she is changed. This change is reflected most obviously in the way her language is transformed. By the end of the story, there is a letting go of sorts in her narrative. Her staccato sentences flare into long sections of stream-of-consciousness as if the words are pouring out of her: “It's not a fish. I know it's not a fish. It's just a big lump of memory at the bottom of the River Nemunas. I say a prayer Dad taught me about God being in the light and the water and the rocks, about God's mercy enduring forever. I say it quickly to myself, hissing it out through my lips, and pull then crank, pull then crank, God is in the light, God is in the water, God is in the rocks, and I can feel Mishap scrabbling around the boat with his little claws and I can even feel his heart beating in his chest, a little bright fist opening and closing, and I can feel the river pulling past the boat, its tributaries like fingernails dragging through the entire country, all of Lithuania draining into this one artery, five hundred sliding miles of water, all the way to the Baltic, which Grandpa Z says is the coldest sea in Europe, and something occurs to me that will probably seem obvious to you but that I never though about before: A river never stops. Wherever you are, whatever you're doing, forgetting sleeping, mourning, dying—the rivers are still running.”In this moment, the way in which Allison has changed over the course of the story, the lessons she has learned about impermanence and experience and grief are expressed not only through what she is saying, but also how she is saying it. This is what perspective can do when done well. It can be more than a decision you make at the beginning of the piece to use "I" instead of "she." It can enrich the story and emotional progress of the character. It can serve a purpose. “The River Nemunas” is the fifth story in Anthony Doerr's collection, Memory Wall.