At the beginning of chapter six, we meet a clergyman’s wife named Mrs. Cadwallader as she pauses to have a quick negotiation over “fowls” with the woman who keeps the lodge on a grand estate. We might determine from Mrs. Cadwallader’s hard bargaining, and many interactions she’ll go on to have, that she is bossy, demanding, critical, and thoroughly convinced of her right to manipulate others. We would not be wrong. The lodge-keeper reacts not to contradict that impression but to complicate any negative feelings it might cause us to have:

laughing and shaking her head slowly, with an interjectional “Surely, surely!” from which it might be inferred that she would have found the countryside somewhat duller if the rector’s lady had been less free-spoken and less of a skinflint. 

What’s more, George Eliot tells us, the “farmers and labourers” of the area in general appreciate the anecdotes Mrs. Cadwallader’s behavior provides, preferring her greatly to “a much more exemplary character with an infusion of sour dignity.” By contrast, Mr. Brooke, the wealthy, kind but indolent man Mrs. Cadwallader is on her way to visit, sees “Mrs. Cadwallader’s merits from a different point of view” and “winced a little when her name was announced in the library.” 

The amused lodge keeper is a character of far less significance to the story than Mrs. Cadwallader, and far far less than Mr. Brooke. She is in fact so minor we will never see her again, so minor that complicating Mrs. Cadwallader is clearly her reason for being. Her success in doing so, despite her rank on the scale of importance, is attributable to the order in which these points of view are offered, and to the larger space hers occupies on the page, and most of all to the fact that Eliot, with her particular brilliance for conjuring humanity, gives her a few good lines of dialogue, a couple of quick-sketching details, and a name. It doesn’t matter that she appears in the story for only a page because Eliot assures us that she exists outside of her role in it. Just as we register and take into account the reactions of actual people, we register and take into account hers. In fiction as in life we participate in communal judgment subconsciously and all the time. Star rankings on the internet influence our opinions, and we don’t even know those people. How much more readily, then, are we influenced by the opinions of people we do know? In that category I include invented people, whom, after all, we sometimes know very, very well. 

About ten years ago I got an important lesson in the narrative uses of this, our influence-ability, from a TV show about TV shows. Called The Writers’ Room, it featured interviews with the writers of various popular series. If you’ve watched the sitcom Parks & Recreation, you might recall that in season 1 its central character, Leslie Knope, comes off as a bit of a ding-dong. This, the writers said in the interview I saw, was unintentional. When they realized the impression the character was making, they changed “not so much who Leslie was but how people responded to her.” This from Amy Poehler, who played the character and should know. Co-creator Mike Schur added, “We had people be impressed by her work ethic instead of going like, ugh, why do I have to work on this thing that I don’t want to work on, and that I think largely changed the perception.” 

As a viewer, I had noted the shift in Leslie’s character, but this interview made me realize that I had wrongly attributed the cause. You can see this change in a comparison of two scenes of meetings, the first from the very first episode, the second from season two. In the first scene, Leslie’s boss announces that Leslie will be running a community outreach forum that night and needs a volunteer to assist her. Leslie beams with joy and pride, looks around the table with her eyebrows lifted, assuming her excitement will be shared. Her colleague Tom grimaces, rolling his eyes. The others ignore her completely. Finally, her boss calls on Tom, who throws up his hands in exasperation and says, “Fine.” The result is that Leslie looks ridiculously eager, a burden to her colleagues, possibly a fool. 

In the later scene, from episode eight of season two, Leslie announces in a meeting that the parks department is “screwed” because of the local library, and in response Tom doesn’t roll his eyes but affirms her reaction, with the exclamation, “Punk-ass book jockeys!” When Leslie goes on to explain that the library wants to “steal” a vacant lot where she’d like to put a park, the room explodes in cries of supportive dismay. They immediately start brainstorming how to address the issue—this time, they’re in her corner. Even when Tom points out to Leslie that she’s “thinking out loud again,” it’s with affectionate humor, and she takes it in stride. 

Like the earlier scene, this one shows us a Leslie who is excitable, overeager, intensely passionate about her job. Leslie is, as Amy Poehler asserted, the same. But she is also different, because other people see her differently, and in narrative as in life she reacts to their reactions. In the first scene she longs for her colleagues’ support; in the second she expects it. Her confident bearing as she takes control of the meeting reflects that expectation. Their reactions shape her sense of self. 

When I was writing my last book, which follows a young, handsome, successful television actor who gets kidnapped, I kept thinking that it was in part about white male privilege, without knowing exactly what I meant by that. Now, I understand myself. What I tried to demonstrate in that book—and in fact saw starkly illustrated in memoirs by kidnap victims—is that diminishment through others’ treatment of you is entirely natural and unavoidable and thus not some proof of weakness in the character of those of us who are regularly subjected to society’s prejudices and oppressions. It is possible to believe that you are not shaped by others’ perceptions of you only when their visible reactions accord with your sense of self, which is one way of thinking about privilege. Other peoples’ faces are a mirror in which we can’t help but see ourselves. We are at least in part the person they perceive us to be. This is true of our invented people as well, and a characterization that does not include this is an incomplete one. 

In Velvet Was the Night, Silvia Moreno-Garcia introduces her character of Elvis as “a thug who wanted to hold his punches.” Elvis is rueful about the ironic contrast between his nature (loving “music and factoids” that help “him construct a more organized world”), and his profession (disrupting, with occasional violence, radical student activities in 1970s Mexico). Nevertheless at the moment where the novel begins, just before a student protest, he is “eager to beat a few motherfuckers up.” Why? Because one of the other hired thugs has been “impugning Elvis’s masculinity in veiled and irritating ways.” 

In short, Elvis was in dire need of asserting himself, of showing his teammates that he wasn’t no fucking marshmallow. He wanted to get dirty, to put all those fighting techniques El Mago made them learn to good use, to show he was as capable as any of the other guys, especially as capable as El Güero, who looked like a fucking extra in a Nazi movie, and Elvis had no doubts that his dear papa had been saying “heil” real merrily until he boarded a boat and moved his stupid family to Mexico. Yeah, El Güero looked like a Nazi and not any Nazi but a gigantic, beefy motherfucking Nazi, and that’s probably why he was so pissed off, because when you look like a blond Frankenstein it’s not that easy to blend in with no one, and it’s much better to be a shorter, slimmer, little dark-haired fucker like Elvis. That’s why El Mago kept El Güero for kidney-smashing and he left the lock picking, the infiltrating, the tailing, to Elvis or El Gazpacho. 

Neither Elvis’s psychological acuity nor his low opinion of El Güero stops him from planning to act in direct response to the other man’s opinion of him. Many of the fascinating complications and conflicts in our characters—our actual characters, as well as the ones we create—arise at the intersection of our traits and inclinations, and the opinions and needs and demands of others and their resulting treatment of ourselves. 

When the action of a plot is going to be interior as much or more than it is exterior, the more conflict we find at that junction, the better. The more at odds a character is with themselves, the more at war over competing internal and external interests, the bigger the narrative arc. Few in the whole history of heroines have made a more profoundly blinkered choice than Middlemarch’s Dorothea Brooke, who chooses to marry a cold pedantic scholar twice her age because she believes he will introduce her to a transcendent world of intellectual achievement, not otherwise accessible to her as a woman in 1840s England. At least Portrait of a Lady’s Isabel Archer had the hots for her terrible husband. Dorothea lacks the excuse of the animal passions, making her self-defeating marital choice entirely with her reasoning mind. Thus George Eliot reminds us that our notions guide our lives as much if not more than pragmatism and physical need. And, because at the same time Eliot takes pains that we admire her heroine by admiring her so overtly herself, Dorothea’s dumbass decision sets up not just the events of the plot but Dorothea herself as a territory for expansive, complicated, and highly dramatic narrative. It’s also worth noting that when Dorothea marries Will Ladislaw at the end of the book, this time in a happy state of fully realized and mutual love, it’s a wiser version of that same faith in her own convictions that allows her to defy convention and find joy. Like Leslie Knope, she has not changed as much as understood herself—understood herself, crucially, thanks in part to Will. Unlike Mr. Casaubon, her first husband, Will loves and understands her and reflects back the self she recognizes. If we are in part the person others believe us to be, if we struggle with internal and external conflicts as a result of that, what could be more satisfying, more peaceful, more unifying of the self than that? 

Acting is reacting. In the acting world, this truism is as widespread as the fiction world’s show don’t tell, and I find it infinitely more useful. To put it into practice in fiction, as in film, TV, and theater, you need more than one character on the stage. Protagonists need someone to react to, and equally vital is the need for someone to react to them.  

What we call literary fiction, though, perhaps especially in the short form, is full of aloneness. This is not a complaint, or at least not entirely. My own characters spend a fair amount of time alone, thinking about stuff. Interiority is one of my favorite things. But I must admit that when I consider fictional moments that live in my mind like my own memories, I am hard-pressed to come up with any in which a character is alone. I can easily summon the shimmering empathy felt by the narrator of “Sonny’s Blues,” as he watches his brother at the piano. Or Dorothea again, comforting Rosamund in a choked voice, even though she believes the other woman has won the heart of the man she herself loves. Dean, in Randall Kenan’s “Run Mourner Run,” in the moment after his lover realizes his betrayal, reaching out and seeing “his pale hand against the broad bronze back,” sensing “the enormity of what he had done, that his hand could never again touch that back, never glide over its ridges and bends and curves, never linger over that mole, pause at this patch of hair, that scar.” Pride & Prejudice’s Elizabeth Bennet is alone when she reads the letter from Darcy that shifts her perspective on everything she thought she knew about him, and in so doing throws into doubt the previously assumed rightness of her own point of view. “Until this moment, I never knew myself!” But this moment doesn’t count, truly, as aloneness. Even if Darcy isn’t physically present, his letter provides his half of the conversation. Without it neither Elizabeth’s comprehension, nor ours, would have evolved. 

Even if George Eliot were less good than she is at writing scenes that reveal new aspects of her characters, she would nevertheless help us know them intimately and in all their complexity. Her narrative stance—omniscient, with direct address and occasional appearances of the ruminating I—provides a consistently characterizing gaze. Here she is employing it in one of the most famous moments in the book:

One morning, some weeks after her arrival at Lowick, Dorothea—but why always Dorothea? Was her point of view the only possible one with regard to this marriage? I protest against all our interest, all our effort at understanding being given to the young skins that look blooming in spite of trouble; for these too will get faded and will know the older and more eating griefs which we are helping to neglect. In spite of the blinking eyes and white moles objectionable to Celia and the want of muscular curve which was morally painful to Sir James, Mr. Casaubon had an intense consciousness within him and was spiritually a-hungered like the rest of us. 

If not as stylistically delightful as Eliot’s interruption of herself, I find equally compelling her refusal to let us loathe the loathsome character of the hypocritical banker and religious zealot Bulstrode. Here, frightened by the appearance in town of a former acquaintance who can expose the scandalous origins of his wealth, he’s engaged in self-justification and seeking an atoning act: 

The spiritual kind of rescue was a genuine need with him. There may be coarse hypocrites, who consciously affect beliefs and emotions for the sake of gulling the world, but Bulstrode was not one of them. He was simply a man whose desires had been stronger than his theoretic beliefs and who had gradually explained the gratification of his desires into satisfactory agreement with those beliefs. 

Are we any different? Eliot goes on to ask. She refuses to let even her worst characters remain for us someone we cannot understand, someone who could never be ourselves. Her type of active narrator, what I think of as a storyteller, whose voice and knowledge and judgments are not hidden from the reader, illuminates any character to whom it pays attention. As with the presence of another character in the room, the presence of the storyteller means characters are never alone. There is always someone reacting to them. 

Perspective-shifting reactions can of course be achieved in any point of view, as in this first-person example from Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. Genly Ai, a man from a much-evolved space-traveling version of us, is envoy to a foreign planet where people are ungendered and have complicated systems of social behavior that he doesn’t fully understand. Someone comes to him hoping he’ll deliver money to the novel’s other primary character, Estraven, a native of this planet who has tried to help Genly in his diplomatic mission and been banished because of it but whom at this point in the story Genly doesn’t trust and feels no responsibility for. When his visitor asks if Genly considers himself in Estraven’s debt, Genly responds rather loftily that his mission “overrides all personal debts and loyalties.”

The stranger says "with fierce certainty" that in that case "it is an immoral mission." Genly tells us, "That stopped me." And then he agrees to the stranger's request.

To achieve full characterization—which I’m defining as bringing the reader to know someone both alone and as part of the social web—it is perhaps all the more important for writers of literary fiction to find moments like this one between Genly and a stranger who forces him to realize that his own place in the social web is more complicated than he wants to think. I say this because many such writers feel they don’t have recourse to the omniscient stance, having been trained in the modern tradition opposed to the arrogance of a godlike perspective. The third-person narrator who has historically dominated the creative writing workshop is a limited one, generally stripped as much as possible of knowledge or judgment separate from the character over whose shoulder they peer. When I taught a graduate class in Narration and Consciousness, I made some of my PhD students extremely uneasy by requiring them to write an exercise in the omniscient voice. They thought not only that they couldn’t do it but that they shouldn’t—others’ oft-repeated beliefs having become a self-conception. In the end some couldn’t quite get there; some did and were elated at this new understanding of themselves. I find it helpful to recall that those of us who have enjoyed and/or endured academic creative writing training have internalized rules that baffle writers and readers of other types. Once I was having a conversation with a writer of literary fiction about how it seemed like the omniscient voice was coming back. Standing with us was a writer of science fiction and fantasy. He frowned, asked, “Where did it go?” Those genres, which make worlds, must allow their practitioners to be gods. 

An interesting variation on the omniscient—which I’ve seen in a few recent sci fi and fantasy novels—is its location in a narrator who is also an actor in the story. In the case of both The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie and The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin, the identity of this narrator/actor isn’t revealed for quite some time, and their omniscience is focused on the protagonist, in a way that feels like a choice rather than a limitation. Each narrator addresses their respective protagonist as you. Because each seems to have the capability to see into multiple minds, that choice gives the narrator’s—and therefore our—interest in the character special weight. I see everyone, but it’s you I care about. 

In this moment early in The Fifth Season, the protagonist has recently found her young son beaten to death, her husband and daughter gone. She has a power—she can connect to earth, cause earthquakes—that her society fears, a power she’s passed on to her children, and she knows that her husband learned the truth about her son and killed him, and that her secret is out. Here she is attempting to leave the village where she’s been living under an assumed identity. 

Your throat is tight. Tirimo has been your home for ten years. You only started to think of it as such—home—around the time of Uche’s birth, but that’s more than you ever expected to do. You remember chasing Uche across the green after he first learned to run. You remember Jija helping Nassun build a kite and fly it, badly; the kite’s remnants are still in a tree somewhere on the eastern side of town.

But it is not as hard to leave as you thought it would be. Not now, with your former neighbors’ stares sliding over your skin like rancid oil. 

This woman, whose name is Essun, is almost to the gate when someone tries to shoot her. She reacts without thought and activates her power.

And because you don’t think, because you’ve been trying not to think and this means you’re out of the habit, because thinking means you will remember that your family is dead and everything that meant happiness is now a lie and thinking of that will make you break and start screaming and screaming and screaming.

Essun does a terrible thing. She not only kills the people and animals in her immediate vicinity, including the town leader who was trying to help her leave, she cracks the aquifer, meaning that ultimately she’s killed the town. Essun is our heroine, and this is one of the first things we see her do. But we see her do it from the point of view of someone who understands her, someone who in fact loves her, and that mitigates the effect. If a gaze can diminish, it can also improve our worth, in our own eyes and those of others, including a reader’s. Once we love, we see the loved one differently. In fiction as in life, our gaze alters what it sees. 

What a writer does to make you love a character goes well beyond the basics of characterization, which is what we teach in classrooms with questionnaires about diaries and favorite foods and trash cans. Those questionnaires suggest that characterization is a relationship between writer and reader. I tell you what someone is like, and if I do my job right you believe me. This can in fact go a long way in the case of the storyteller narrator. Take for instance Andrew Sean Greer’s novel, Less, another book with a narrator who is an actor in the story and whose identity is for a long time concealed. I love its title character, Arthur Less, in part because—perhaps mostly because—the narrator loves him, and even when he describes Arthur’s many failings and foibles, he does so with the understanding and forgiveness of love. If I love Arthur, it is at least in part because I love that love. Persuaded of its validity, I embrace it as my own. 

If we are writing in first person or a limited third, we need moments of intimacy—positive and negative—between characters to achieve this illuminating effect. Rather than what’s in a character’s trashcan, we’d do better to ask how they react when criticized by a parent or given a compliment by a colleague, when asking for or granting a favor, when a close friend points out an uncomfortable truth. Revealing moments of intimacy can occur between any two or more people, strangers, colleagues, an old friend again encountered, and are particularly satisfying when they involve the breaking down of walls, the vulnerable expression of the self and a sense of connection to another. In life, we are often surprised by such moments, and the affection that they either reveal or give rise to. Like Elizabeth Bennet, we might think that we didn’t properly know ourselves, and that we didn’t properly see the other person before. In the same way does one character loving another teach us to see them both differently. 

A story that moves toward greater understanding and intimacy might of course more succinctly be called a romance. If I’m using the word romance to mean a plot rather than a genre, I define it broadly, to include not just relationships of desire and courtship, but also those between friends and family. All stories driven by romance will have one of its basic shapes, which I illustrate for students with less-than and greater-than signs and which involve variations on being together and apart. As Aristotle said, a story moves from bad fortune to good, or good fortune to bad. A romance driving toward a happy ending is most likely to begin with its characters as far apart as possible, whether by internal or external means or both, while one headed for tragedy, like Romeo and Juliet, is most likely to begin with love at first sight. 

No matter which approach it takes, a romance of any kind is the story where plot is overtly the investigation of character, writ large. I mean this in contrast to the more specific questions of character on which the mystery and the quest are focused and predicated: Why do we do bad things? and Are we brave enough? The movement of the plot of a happy romance is toward a broader understanding of the self, as well as intimate access to another—an invitation to understanding in both directions. The tragic romance is one where either interfering external circumstances prevail, despite the achievement of this goal, or one that mourns the failure to achieve it. Another way to say this is that the goal of a romance plot is the acquisition of emotional intelligence, rather than the discovery of a murderer or the securing or destroying of a magic object or the saving or destroying of the world. Internal rather than external achievement. The marriage, for all we call it “the marriage plot,” is not the point. The declaration of love is the point. The marriage is the celebratory last song. In her essay “Nothing but Herself: Embracing Jane Austen’s Second Chances,” Margot Livesey says that the romance speaks to “the delicate and tremulous part of ourselves that yearns for the great good fortune of intimate connection and understanding” and “that deep need we all have to be recognized.” I imagine one reason romance continues to be viewed in certain circles, as Livesey fears it is, “as slight, or unworthy, subject matter” is that not everyone sees the arrival at intimate connection—the development of emotional intelligence and the expression of feeling—as being a sufficient goal.   

I want to close with a return to The Left Hand of Darkness, which in addition to being a sci fi novel with an interest in politics, religion, and culture—particularly how sexual practices and ideas of gender shape culture—is also, I would in fact say primarily, a romance. One of the functions of sci fi is to demonstrate just how vastly different it’s possible for our experiences and resulting worldviews to be. The farther apart people are in those worldviews—and you can’t get much farther than being from another planet—the starker the misunderstandings between them, the greater the danger for resulting awfulness, and the more satisfying the crossing of that great and perilous divide to find connection. If your science fiction novel is also a romance, all of that can augment significantly the drama and intensity of your love story. Intimacy between aliens is not easily won. 

In Left Hand of Darkness, it requires an escape from a labor camp and a life-or-death trek across a frozen expanse. One night, in their tent on the ice, Genly at last recognizes the sexual attraction between himself and Estraven. They don’t act on it, but “the great and sudden assurance of friendship between us rose: a friendship so much needed by us both in our exile, and already so well proved in the days and nights of our bitter journey, that it might as well be called, now as later, love.” 

This scene, and a passage I’m about to quote, gave rise to an expression in one of my graduate classes: “the tent moment,” which fiction writer (and my former student) Molly Reid defined in an essay as characters “confined, either by choice or circumstance, to share a small space where they are able to achieve an intimacy impossible in the wild.” Tent moments, she went on to say, give “the reader an emotional connection to the main character,” play “a pivotal role in plot,” and finally become, for the main character, “a frozen moment in time, something he returns to.” Here is Genly in a rare flashforward:  

Sometimes as I am falling asleep in a dark, quiet room I have for a moment a great and treasurable illusion of the past. The wall of a tent leans up over my face, not visible but audible, a slanting plane of faint sound: the susurrus of blown snow. Nothing can be seen. The light-emission of the Chabe stove is cut off, and it exists only as a sphere of heat, a heart of warmth. The faint dampness and confining cling of my sleeping bag; the sound of the snow; barely audible, Estraven’s breathing as he sleeps; darkness. Nothing else. We are inside, the two of us, in shelter, at rest, at the center of all things. Outside, as always, lies the great darkness, the cold, death’s solitude.

In such fortunate moments as I fall asleep I know beyond doubt what the real center of my own life is, in that time that is past and lost and yet is permanent, the enduring moment, the heart of warmth.

Likely we have, as readers, recognized from chapter one that an important relationship will develop between these two characters. But the Genly at the beginning of the book could never have imagined it. How did Le Guin get him, and us, there?

It starts with noticing. One character makes an imprint on another’s consciousness. As readers we notice this noticing, often because the reason for it isn’t clear and therefore a mystery, and consciously or subconsciously we bookmark a mystery. I’m not just guessing here—neuroscience has backed up the claim E.M. Forster makes in Aspects of the Novel, that “a mystery is a pocket in time,” leaving a part of the mind “behind, brooding, while the other part goes marching on.” There are a number of ways to achieve this bookmarking. Perhaps our point of view character notices a stranger at the next table, can’t stop looking at them even while their own companions talk. Perhaps they’re anticipating or dreading a meeting with someone, speculating what this person will be like. Le Guin stresses Estraven’s importance in other ways: Estraven is the first person Genly describes, the description is lengthy and detailed, and the primacy and consistency of Genly’s attention to Estraven is itself a mystery. 

A stocky dark Karhider with sleek and heavy hair, wearing a heavy overtunic of green leather worked with gold, and a heavy white shirt, and heavy breeches, and a neck-chain of heavy silver links a hand broad . . . So he often speaks, frank yet cautious, ironic, as if always aware that I see and judge as an alien: a singular awareness in one of so isolate a race and so high a rank.

When someone intrigues or unsettles us, as Estraven does Genly, we become detectives, watching them for clues. From the initial noticing, our character’s heightened awareness of the other person will persist, and they will draw conclusions, often the wrong ones, ones that will be barriers to intimacy. 

He is one of the most powerful men in the country . . . one feels the man’s power as an augmentation of his character; he cannot make an empty gesture or say a word that is not listened to. He knows it, and the knowledge gives him more reality than most people own: a solidness of being, a substantiality, a human grandeur. Nothing succeeds like success. I don’t trust Estraven, whose motives are forever obscure; I don’t like him; yet I feel and respond to his authority as surely as I do to the warmth of the sun. 

Genly misunderstands Estraven constantly. He misinterprets sincerity as irony, Estraven’s efforts to help in his diplomatic mission as attempts to gain political prestige. When we are very close to the character, we make perhaps not all but many of the same mistakes. Genly’s Estraven is also ours. When Genly suspects that he is manipulative and untrustworthy, we must suspect that also, and so pay him the same close and wary attention. As prolonged eye contact is said to be crucial to the development of love for another person, so is this consistent gaze crucial to the development of fictional love—in other words to our conviction that that love exists, and to the love we ourselves feel for the characters involved. 

Noticing isn’t enough, though, especially if our characters are wary of one another. Necessity is also required: a reason, perhaps a series of accumulating reasons, for the two characters to be in proximity, and at least to some degree alone together. The isolation could be as complete as Genly and Estraven in the tent, or as partial and temporary as the words exchanged while dancing at a Jane Austen ball. Whatever the external circumstances, they must destabilize the characters’ relationship and so shift them out of whatever defensive postures they might have assumed. To these steps of noticing and necessity I would add reevaluation. In the spirit of Elizabeth Bennet, reevaluation of the other person, if it is to be fully satisfying, must involve a resulting reevaluation of the self. If I had time I would outline the numerous small reevaluations that occur on the way to the profound change in Genly’s consciousness. Instead I’ll quote two more passages that illustrate the connection between the reevaluation of the other and the reevaluation of the self, i.e. the kind of shifting, complicated characterization, one based on context and relationships, that I’m advocating for. Here is Genly in the tent, a few days into the journey across the ice. 

I looked at Estraven, stretched out sound asleep on his sleeping-bag a couple of feet from me. He wore nothing but his breeches; he was hot. The dark secret face was laid bare to the light, to my gaze. Estraven asleep looked a little stupid, like everyone asleep: a round, strong face relaxed and remote, small drops of sweat on the upper lip and over the heavy eyebrows. I remembered how he had stood sweating on the parade-stand in Erhenhang in panoply of rank and sunlight. I saw him now defenseless and half-naked in a colder light, and for the first time saw him as he was. 

And again, farther along on the ice, and after the blossoming of “what might as well be called, now as later, love”:

He had been quite right to say that he, the only person on Gethen who trusted me, was the only Gethenian I distrusted. For he was the only one who had entirely accepted me as a human being, who had liked me personally and given me entire personal loyalty, and who therefore had demanded of me an equal degree of recognition, of acceptance. I had not been willing to give it. I had been afraid to give it. 

Now Genly, who first saw Estraven, and told us to see him, as ironic, untrustworthy, manipulative, will note with assurance that he is in fact “an honest person, but rarely a direct one.” He knows him now; he knows far better what to tell us to see. 

Love in a narrative offers us one person looking at another, so that our impressions are our own and theirs as well. If the writer offers us multiple points of view, as Le Guin and Eliot both do, they can flip the gaze, so that after misunderstanding Character X while in the perspective of Character Y, we now get the riddle solved. Y, poor Y, goes on being wrong about the moment they’re actually living, while we are little gods of comprehension. We not only know exactly why the moment is unfolding as it is, we recognize in a way we can’t always from the confines of our own perspective how often we ourselves are wrong, how often we are misunderstanding and being misunderstood, how often the connections we long for slip out of our grasp. It is terribly sad to recognize that. And it is terribly beautiful to have that sadness, in this moment of our perfect knowledge of the minds of others, both acknowledged and erased.