Counterpoint:
Tone and Point of View in Mark Helprin's "North Light"
This paper was an assignment written for ENGL576: Fiction Writing, Ken Smith, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Spring 1988.
In Mark Helprin's "North Light," the narrative point of view is interlaced with an atmosphere of tension like a drawn bowstring, woven back and forth between scene and exposition, between telling detail and significancies. "We are being held back," (Helprin 1175) the narrator begins, and the story takes on an element of unreality as he describes how he and the other soldiers are "absorbed in the mystery of matching the puffs of white smoke from tank cannon with the sounds that follow" where "only the great roar rising from the battle proves it not to be a dream" (Helprin 1175). Later the narrator says, "High in the air," fighter planes appear like "silver specks . . . dueling in a dream of blue silence" (Helprin 1176). This feeling of unreality emphasizes both the soldiers' role of "merely watching" (Helprin 1176) and the "trancelike movements" (Helprin 1176) necessary to each soldier if he is to survive. They are "being held back" (Helprin 1175), not only by the officers in charge, but also by their own fear.
The narrator acts both as a participant within the group of soldiers and as spokesperson for and commentator on them indicated by the shifts in person in his references to himself and the other soldiers: first person singular, first and second person plural and third person plural. The narration is primarily in first person plural, with the other sections restricted to the beginning of the story. The effect of these shifts is to establish the narrator, not only as a member of the group, but also as its reliable spokesperson.
The point-of-view shifts also allow Helprin to move back and forth between a risky telling about the soldiers' fears and an internal array of details that become metaphors for those fears. For instance, Helprin shifts to first person narration in an abbreviated scene where he sees the man next to him "deeply absorbed in sniffing his wrist" (Helprin 1175). This image, the scent of the wife's perfume, "the taste of her mouth" (Helprin 1175) becomes emblematic of the problems faced by the married men in the unit, unable to be "eighteen again" (Helprin 1176) and "strong as the blood which is rising and fill[ing the young men's] chests with anger and strength" (Helprin 1175).
Later in the narration Helprin shifts to a seemingly external narrator (indicated by his references to the soldiers as "they") who divides the men into two groups: the "young ones" and the "married men" (Helprin 1175). The narrator characterizes the difference between the soldiers as one of responsibility. The young men are "responsible only to themselves" and so, "with little to lose" are "no more frightened than members of a sports team before an important match" (Helprin 1175).
The married men, on the other hand, because of their families "must not die" (Helprin 1175). They "are trying to strike an exact balance between their responsibility as soldiers, their fervent desire to stay alive, and their only hope--which is to go into battle with the smooth, courageous, trancelike movements that will keep them out of trouble" (Helprin 1176). Helprin counterbalances this apparent distancing of the narrator by his self-identification both with the married men and by extension with the younger soldiers, as for instance, when he says, "Now we know that courage is the forced step of going into battle when you want anything in the world but that. . . . and you are forced to be eighteen again, but you can't be . . . not with the taste of your wife's mouth in your mouth" (Helprin 1176). In this way, the effect of the distancing is caught up in the tone of the work, indicating the narrator's sense of distance from the war and his attempts to come to grips with the reality of it. The narrator's commentary, because of its density of metaphor and authority of experience, draws the reader into the dilemma of the men.
The narrator's realization of restraint as a kind of building potential energy for battle in his allusions to the Six Day War mark a change in the tone of the story. Like sparking static electricity, the men become restless; they swear and "kick the sides of the half-tracks" (Helprin 1177). Where earlier, Helprin's encapsulated scenes and details regarding time (the soldier's joke, the man "close to fifty" unable to remember the time although he has checked his watch "fifty times in the last hour") (Helprin 1176) have emphasized the soldiers' fear at being held back, here the narration expands into the longest scene of the story, the Syrian armored advance and the Israeli air support response. The dream-like, unreal (almost timeless) atmosphere of the story is exchanged for a violent sequence of events.
Reality breaks into the narration. A young soldier screams. "God!" he says. "Look! Look!" (Helprin 1177). Intense sensory images are described as the Israeli planes fly over: "lungs shaking like drums"; "flights of fighters roar over the hill"; "heat from the tailpipes"; "orange flames . . . blinding"; the men's cheers "in anger and in satisfaction" (Helprin 1177).
Again the narrator shifts position from observer-participant to empathetic spokesperson as the external heat of battle becomes internal. "The married men feel as if rivers are rushing through them, crossing and crashing, for they are angry and full of energy." When the orders come to move, the soldiers "jump" in the half-tracks (Helprin 1177).
The shattered dream begun by the arrival of the Israeli air support is echoed by the soldiers. They have their "own thunder" (Helprin 1177). The "roaring" as the young drivers "race" the half-track engines (Helprin 1177), the sound of the "levers of the gearshifts" (Helprin 1178) indicate the release of restraint which is emphasized by the short declarative statements of the last few lines. The tension, carefully drawn, is not lost like a bow left strung, warped out of shape. The arrow is loosed "at the right time" (Helprin 1177). "Now our drivers exhale and begin to drive. Now we are moving" (Helprin 1178).
Helprin, Mark. "North Light: A Recollection in the Present Tense." The Story and its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. Ed. Ann Charters. 2nd ed. New York: Bedford, 1987. 1175-1178.