Characters with parts of their minds missing, 3: Characters with no motivation
A second essay in memorian for Dag Solstad
This is a series of posts on a fascinating problem for contemporary fiction: What happens to fiction when a character’s mind is partly closed, either to the character or to the implied author? It’s not a problem to write about a character from the outside—to watch them, as we all watch one another, without having access to their mind. But it is a very difficult and interesting challenge to “focalize” a character, in Gérard Genette’s term, in such a way that we can read some of their thoughts, but not others.
This series was originally called “Writers who won’t tell us what their characters are thinking,” but that didn’t capture the theme that interests me, because it includes taciturn characters like the ones in Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Carver. Their mystery is only temporary: eventually we understand the murderer’s plans, the detective’s suspicions, the silent hero’s wounded heart. The new title sounds like I might be interested in pathology or injury, but it signals the strangeness I am after: I’m curious about minds, in fiction, that remain partly opaque, redacted, or empty. A less dramatic title might have been Incomplete Minds in Fiction.
Here’s the series:
Characters with no motivation (this post)
I’ve been thinking out loud, as it were, and all these posts are open to comments. I’d love to hear about other examples and theories. I’m grateful to
and for comments on earlier versions.Like Solstad’s T. Singer, this novel is an interesting opportunity to think about writing fiction where the main characters are absent or unaccountable. Here the issue is a character we think we know, who nevertheless behaves in ways that are difficult to understand. It’s a subtler problem than the one posed in T. Singer, where the notion is that the main character is simply undescribed.
In this case we seem to have full access to the character’s thoughts, and yet he does things that he himself either doesn’t understand or doesn’t explain. I’m interested in both possibilities as a way to make the usual access to inner states more difficult, and demonstrate divided consciousness.
Novel 11, Book 18 is a clever title. It isn’t explained in the book, but in retrospect it means that the main character, called Bjørn Hansen (in full) throughout the novel, is not as unusual as he thinks. There are at least four competing influences here: Kierkegaard, whom Bjørn Hansen reads; Bernhard, whose satires and rants bubble up intermittently; Gombrowicz, very much liked by Solstad; and Ibsen, whose play “The Wild Duck” is produced in the novel, with Bjørn Hansen as an actor. These compete in the sense that they have different kinds of influence on the book. The one that’s decisive for my theme is Ibsen, and I think it’s an unfortunate influence, because if I read Novel 11, Book 18 as if it were by Ibsen, I’m likely to explain away Bjørn Hansen’s behavior as the product of his ordinary, repressed life. As in T. Singer, this novel’s formal experimentation threatens to give way to a portraiture of middle class muddling.
At first the wheelchair, the novel’s central conceit, seems to block this sort of reading. Bjørn Hansen concocts a plot to put himself in a wheelchair for life even though he’s healthy. It gives him a “moist, dark peace,” he says, to see the world from his wheelchair. The obituary in The New York Times (March 25, 2025) suggests that the idea to live in a wheelchair lets the character “escape the monotony of his existence.” Mitchelmore reads the wheelchair as being “about the gap between our hopes and ideas and the experience of life,” which is true, but it’s important to note that Bjørn Hansen is puzzled by his own motives. If this were Ibsen, the wheelchair would align with the many other things Bjørn Hansen does, and they would all be symptoms of the same purposeless, largely loveless life.
I’d prefer to read this book without Ibsen, as it were, because then the way Solstad depicts Bjørn Hansen becomes a really interesting conundrum. I think only about one-fifth of the book is about the wheelchair plot, although it is the book’s, and the character’s, end point. He is twice married, he’s left both his wives, he has a partial rapprochement with his son, he has made a good career for himself as the treasurer of a small town in Norway, he gets involved in the theater: if all of that is something other than material to help explain his decision to spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair, then what is it? I recognize this is reading against the grain, but not, I hope, too much, because Bernhard, Gombrowicz, and Kierkegaard all point to more structural questions: lives divided against themselves, lives only partially legible to the people living them.
The problem that interests me is how to write about a fictional character whose inner life is only partly accessible either to the character himself or to readers. Is it possible to depict a character who has some thoughts that are accessible to the narration, and others that aren’t? A character whose intentions are not always available to himself? Bjørn Hansen is divided in such a way that part of him remains opaque to himself, and that division is never explained. For me, Novel 11, Book 18 doesn’t manage this in a consistent or persuasive way, and I recognize that’s partly because Solstad’s intention is what I’m identifying with Ibsen: he wants to paint the portrait of an ordinary unfulfilled life with a lightly surreal interpolation. But there’s also a structural possibility here, more like Beckett's “Ill Seen Ill Said,” and from that perspective this is a narrative about a person we think we know whose actions are sometimes incomprehensible even to himself.
Problems in representing lacunae in a narrator’s mind
One difficulty here, from a writer’s point of view, is how to read the passages in which Bjørn Hansen analyzes people. A number of pages are spent analyzing the motives of his friends and the life and tastes of his son. Bjørn Hansen’s ruminations are presented as insightful. I can imagine a different version of this book which takes Bjørn Hansen’s defective awareness of himself as an opportunity to present those analyses as strangely incomplete or oddly reasoned. Then the lacuna in his capacity for self-reflection, which ends up swallowing him and the book, would be evenly distributed.
The same observation applies, in reverse, to moments in his life that are not explained at all, especially his reasons for leaving both his wives. His first wife is entirely absent from the book even though he takes in his son by that marriage, and his second wife disappears from the story after their separation, despite the fact that he lives in the same town of 25,000 people.
There’s a passage near the end when he meditates on his motives for living in a wheelchair. He makes a list of possible reasons, rejecting each one in turn:
He could no longer remember why he had been so obsessed with this idea. He knew he had been obsessed, but could no longer explain why. He sat there trying to think back, to find the thread that made him actually go through with it. It certainly wasn’t the life of a wheelchair user that fascinated him. Nor was it the thought of sitting in a wheelchair pretending to be paralyzed when he wasn’t thereby fooling everyone. It was not the irresistible fascination of making a fool of society—his friends, acquaintances, even his own son—that had driven him to this. What was it, then? He did not know... he could accept that, deep inside, he felt a profound satisfaction at having carried out this act...
In fact he doesn’t try very hard to understand himself, and that itself isn’t adequately explained. When we’re first told about his plan, we aren’t told what it is, which keeps part of his thoughts away from us. (That’s a flaw, I think, because there’s no other moment in the novel when we don’t have full access to his thoughts.) Then he apparently forgets about his plot for fifty pages or so, while other events take place, and remembers it when it comes time to put the plan into action. That gap is not explained (how could he not have been thinking about his plan all along?), and his minimal, lackadaisical, almost insouciant attitude to his life in the wheelchair isn't plausible even in the context of Norwegian and other Scandinavian fiction about minimally communicative people. An intense, ongoing introspection wouldn’t be right for this character—he’s not a creation of Dostoevsky’s—but puzzlement over his lack of interest in introspection should have been part of his inner life.
A question
How, then, to write a fictional character, with access to some of their thoughts, but in such a way as to make room for a part of their mind—especially their motivations, their awareness of those motivations, and their capacity to assess the effects of their actions—that is inaccessible to them? And how to let the narrative reflect the author’s own capacity to manage or explain those moments?