Katherine Anne Porter's short novel
Pale Horse, Pale Rider is the stunning portrayal of a young woman's struggle to survive a war-torn America and the influenza outbreak of 1918. Within this world, protagonist Miranda weighs personal morality and social expectation, love in the face of dire circumstances, the waking versus the unconscious/delirious world, sickness and health, and, ultimately, the differences between life and death.
Throughout the fifty page story, Porter negotiates these dichotomies without ever seeming overly conscious of doing so, and all from the point of view of a woman who is, at various points in the story, asleep, awake, healthy, sick, and nearly dead. One article described Porter's use of “structured stream of consciousness.” Everything is indeed set in close third person point of view, and while reading I felt very much as if I was inside Miranda's head the entire time, experiencing and thinking about everything as she was experiencing and thinking about it.
It begs us to ask the question: why have this story in third person at all? If there is no veil between what she sees and what we see, why not simply tell it in first person? Before I can attempt to answer this question, I want to examine the areas in which there are deviations from the standard point of view. For instance, there are different treatments of Miranda's thoughts. Most of the time we receive her thoughts in close third as “she... decided she was past praying for.” Other times we get her verbatim thoughts as dialogue: “Miranda, desperately silent, had thought, “Suppose I were not a coward”....” Other times her verbatim thoughts are written without quotes: “I can't let Adam see me like this, she told herself.” Still other times Porter actually switches to first person, and it is this striking shift that I want to focus on in this post. The shift occurs as early as the second paragraph of the story, which starts, “Now I must get up and go while they are all quiet.” Both the first and second paragraphs reference Miranda's thoughts, but the first paragraph refers to them only via the pronouns “she” and “her,” which is what makes the second paragraph's POV choice so surprising.
This latter technique of shifting to first person POV occurs rather infrequently, though, after this first usage in which Miranda is narrating her dream (as it is occurring) about the Pale Rider. There are only three other times in which “I” is used outside of quotations and not prefaced by “she thought.” One passage occurs while Miranda is on her way to the cantonment hospital with a group of other women—and in this passage it eventually becomes clear that the "I"'s in question are representative of the dialogue of the women around her, and not Miranda herself. In fact, Miranda breaks this passage with a physical act: the paragraph ends with a dash, as if interrupted, and the next paragraph starts: “Miranda, carrying her basket of flowers, moved in among the young women, who scattered out and rushed upon the ward uttering girlish laughter....” Even though we were inside her head at the beginning of the previous paragraph, and return to her by the beginning of the next, that nebulous space in between is occupied quite directly by the dialogue of others. This example is really fascinating, because their dialogue is not in quotations, and it reads the first time as if it were an interior thought process. While most of the time we are seeing others through Miranda's thoughts and feelings, here we are reading the dialogue of others as Miranda's most intimate (first person) thoughts and feelings. Porter so deftly sets the stage for a depiction of the fragmentation of self, and of Miranda's (and others) “continual effort to bring together and unite firmly the disturbing oppositions in her day-to-day existence, where survival, she could see clearly, had become a series of feats of sleight of hand.” Miranda's existence is invaded by expectations of how she should think about the war, so much so that the women's banal chatter about the soldiers' experiences has wended its way into her interior thoughts.
The third passage of first person not prefaced by “she thought” occurs when Miranda is musing over Chuck's words at the play. She begins to think of how men seem to view the war, especially men who are not allowed to fight, which leads to stream of consciousness: “Bread will win the war. Work will win, sugar will win, peach pits will win the war. Nonsense.
Not nonsense, I tell you....” Here, Miranda's consciousness has again been invaded by the rhetoric impressed on her by others, but in this case she actually seems to be answering back. Because here we are not only in first person, but also making reference to second person. Who is the “you” she is speaking to in her mind? Herself? Society? The reader? Perhaps all three. It is not altogether clear.
The opening of the last section signifies the last use of unqualified first person. “Now if real daylight such as I remember having seen in this world would only come again....” Miranda is now the embodiment of the fragmented self, not quite dead but not wholly alive, with “one foot in either world,” as she puts it. This first person narrative demonstrates how Miranda is capable of only tepid twilight living immediately following her recovery. But it can also be understood as that in-between state between so many other things, the smaller moments that can indeed become imbued with as much personal importance as more grandiose things such as life and death. The first instance of first person is in reference to Miranda's dream of death, the second of the social rules of talking about war, the third of the rhetoric of war, the fourth of Miranda's waking up to life again, only to feel its “dead cold light.”
In many ways, these passages told in the most personal POV, first person, are the least personal. They are simply iterations of death, which is by nature impersonal (i.e. death doesn't discriminate and gets us all in the end). We tend to get much more of Miranda's emotions through the “Miranda thought she...” or “Miranda thought, I...” close third convention (not to conflate the use of she versus I in this convention: the prevalence of both styles of close third in this story warrant their own essay, but I won't be discussing their differences here). To revisit the original question, why have this story in third person? Perhaps Porter wanted to underscore the distance Miranda has had to set up from herself in order to survive all the death that surrounds her. Death, the impersonal, has become the personal, while direct first person narration has lost all of its intimacy. Because thoughts are veiled, actions are monitored and love is futile, life itself in this story has lost its intimacy.
There is one final deviation in point of view worth mentioning. Near the very end of the story, there is a paragraph told from the point of view of Miss Tanner, the nurse that has resurrected Miranda from the dead. We have the entire time been inside Miranda's head, and yet four pages from the end of the story we get this: “(Miss Tanner) had an affection for the salvaged creature before her, the silent ungrateful human being whom she, Cornelia Tanner, a nurse who knew her business, had snatched back from death with her own hands. 'Nursing is nine-tenths, just the same,' Miss Tanner would tell the other nurses; 'keep that in mind.'” Again Porter has subverted our expectations of point of view by suddenly dropping back into a more omniscient role. The veil of life through Miranda's eyes is briefly lifted and a whole other world is revealed. This underscores the concept of narrative and personal distance, of course, but it also highlights another dichotomy. In many ways, Miss Tanner is actually Miranda's foil: while Miranda initially wants nothing to do with the death (though she comes to represent it), Miss Tanner dedicates herself to bringing life back to those patients “past saving.” The placement of this split in POV is also important. Because it occurs just after Miranda has regained consciousness and lost all her desire to live, it serves to contrast how utterly changed Miranda is from all those around her who have not themselves experienced death. By breaking established POV conventions at this moment, Porter is able to show how Miranda's thoughts have now completely isolated her from the women around her who tend to the dying. Like the men coming back from the war, Miranda is now detached from life in a way that those who have not experienced death will never fully understand.
Porter is more fully able to express Miranda's thoughts and feelings to us through these aberrations in POV, these refractions of her perspective. It is almost as if we can only see Miranda's situation clearly through the reflection of a slightly angled mirror, sometimes through her eyes, sometimes through our own, but always a step removed from the actual experience. Even Miranda is aware of this. At times Miranda literally watches herself, as in a dream in which “she saw herself run swiftly down this gangplank to the slanting deck, and standing there, she leaned on the rail and waved gaily to herself in bed.” Or in attempting, while delirious, to talk to her doctor, when “to her horror she heard herself babbling nonsense, knowing it was nonsense though she could not hear what she was saying.” There is a way in which Miranda could not tell this story entirely in first person, but a way in which to use only third person would seem ridiculous. The novel becomes much stronger in the close third, with these brief, sparse, powerful first person and omniscient interludes that remind us of the impossibility of remaining completely immersed in the self during immediate and prolonged trauma. Ultimately, Porter's use of this technique creates a haunting reading experience that echoes the dissociation that occurs when our own traumas unfold.
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