(Not) Procrastinating

I've admitted to myself that continuously refreshing my inbox isn't going to make Jason's notes come any faster, and that hiding under my bed isn't going to make the other work that I should have already done go away, so I've finally settled in to try and do my American taxes. Which are far more confusing than my English taxes, because the tax forms all assume that you're earning in USD, living in the States, and getting all these forms along with your income that don't seem to exist in Britain. Take multiple currencies, add tax years that cover different date ranges, multiply by the number of different income streams, and it will make perfect sense why I've been doing literally anything other than dealing with it.

When I got to be a teenager and started earning money, my parents told me that I shouldn't worry about taxes: my dad would do them until I got married, then my husband would do them until one of us kicked it, and that was the way the world worked. Then when I got to my twenties and had to juggle paying for grad school with a dozen sources of income in four currencies without screwing up enough to land in jail my mom told me to stop stressing about it, my financial situation couldn't possibly be as topsy-turvey as I insisted it was. Now I have an accountant because no one, related by blood or marriage, is willing to touch my taxes without fiscal encouragement, and it's the most I can manage to gather together the documentation; I'd rather go to jail for evasion than file myself.

Come to think of it, my family has a pretty consistent track record for giving me a hard time for worrying about things that they say either won't happen or shouldn't worry me, only for the exact thing I've gotten worked up about to turn out to be exactly as much of an issue as I initially thought it would be. Sometimes it takes weeks, sometimes years, but it seems to always happen - with the exception of my paralysing fear that I'd not get into university.

So I was riffling through my filing cabinet trying to find the documents for the accountant and pulling out writery things for the Archive - and being unprecedentedly proud of myself for not only managing to hang onto all of my payment advice slips from last year, but having them all in the same file AND in the house where the tax doing needs to happen - when I found a bunch of writing from the end of the MA that I'd totally forgotten about. And one of the little bits was a sort of note-to-self in defence of the first person. And since all that sort of thing is going to the Archive I figured it made sense to copy it out here (which is actually why I sat down to write this post in the first place, as opposed to whining about taxes) because it's a question I still haven't heard satisfactorily answered.

A while back I wrote a horror story in which the narrator gets turned into a zombie at the end, and the editor of the anthology it was going in objected to the use of the first person on the grounds that, if the character gets turned into a zombie, how are they narrating the story? Which made me think about the whole idea of first person narrators. Epistolary novels have more or less fallen by the wayside, so in a lot of cases, while a first-person narrator is essentially telling the reader the story, exactly how that is occurring isn't made clear, even if it is technically plausible. In most cases the narrator stays alive to the end, so I suppose it could be argued that they wrote the whole thing down after the fact. Except we all accept that fiction is a construct - the first person narrator isn't the one who has written the story. And so I object to the idea that the question 'how is this person telling us this story?' has to have a logical answer.

What makes less sense? That there's some disembodied consciousness following a bunch of characters around who then records it all once they've offed each other so that an external party can enjoy the account, or that the reader is a parasite in the character's mind and therefore experiencing it all as it happens. Why can't the narrator die at the end? What demands the greater suspension of disbelief: that the narrator dies and yet the narration follows them through death, or the fact that this takes place in a world where black magic is possible and girls can turn their older sisters into zombies?

There aren't many questions that irk me more than 'how is this narration possible?' It's possible because we as a species have developed written language and an appreciation for fiction. It's possible because the narrative hasn't actually been written by the narrator. It exists, therefor it's possible.