On the Choice of Narrator

This note seeks to explain a smaller decision than the one addressed elsewhere in these pages, though it is not, I think, a minor one. Having settled on Sita’s fire trial as the chronicle’s subject, a question of craft remained. Whose voice would carry it?

The obvious choices were declined for reasons worth stating. Sita’s own voice, however faithfully rendered, would have turned the chronicle into testimony, and testimony asks a reader to take a side before the facts are fully laid out. Rama’s voice would have turned it into confession or defense, and a defense, however sincerely written, tends to know its own conclusion in advance. Sarama’s a minor character in the Valmiki canon where she appears as Vibhishana’s wife and Sita’s companion during the captivity, present at the margins of the great events rather than at their center. She has no throne, no reputation, and no divine reputation of her own to protect in the telling.

A chronicler of this kind is not a neutral instrument, and I have not tried to write her as one. She has attachments, chiefly to Sita, and the text does not conceal them. She writes as someone who watched a friend endure something and who has had years, in the writing, to resist the easier verdicts, of villain and victim, that grief tends to reach for first. I am hopeful that this vantage point does for the reader what it did for the writing: it keeps the moral question open a little longer than a more authoritative narrator would have allowed.