All You Zombies

In fiction writing, the standard omniscient (all-seeing) viewpoint permits an author to approach a story from any number of angles. By contrast, a first-person viewpoint, though densely packed with the narrator’s thoughts and reactions, limits the story to what the narrator can observe. In Zombies, the author uses time-travel paradoxes to permit his narrator to be all the main characters at once. Thus, several viewpoints arise, and the first-person perspective acquires much of the omniscient viewpoint as well.

Handling this is tricky, and the author plots his story carefully. His narrator allows the Unmarried Mother to tell his story up to the year 1970, whereupon the narrator travels back in time to specific places in the Unmarried Mother’s timeline, repairing and maintaining that timeline, until the reader understands that the narrator is the Unmarried Mother, whose life history is the narrator’s as well. In this way, the narrator teaches the Unmarried Mother—and the reader—that Jane, her infant daughter, the Unmarried Mother, and the bartender all are the same person. Thus, the narrator deliberately meets with himself at several stages in his own past. His point of view has been omniscient all along.

One of the author’s signature effects is his use of chatty dialog—down-to-earth, smart, quick, friendly—and this effect is on display in Zombies. The technique helps to explain the characters’ moods and motivations through their words, in somewhat the same way that, for example, the author Gustave Flaubert explained his character Madame Bovary by describing her bedroom and the things contained in it.

For example, the narrator sums up the Unmarried Mother’s lifelong frustration in his testy reaction when the bartender interrupts him: “Don’t interrupt or swelp me, I won’t talk” (4). The word “swelp” is itself an example of another of the author’s signature effects, words invented on the fly that capture a character’s attitude—in this case, impatience.

The chatty dialog is clear and direct; it captures in a few words a great deal of description. The Unmarried Mother explains his heartbreak when, as the young woman Jane, he wins and then loses the first man he loved just after they have sex for the first and only time: “He walked me home and told me he loved me—and kissed me good-night and never came back” (6). All the excitement and waiting and sorrow and bitterness of that relationship comes up in that one sentence.

By contrast, the narrator’s voice is less dramatic: It’s restrained, practical, and businesslike. This signals that the character has matured and mellowed over time. He puts it succinctly: “thirty subjective-years of time-jumping wears you down” (14).

The net effect of the dialog—and most of the story told in conversation—is that the narrator, and all his earlier incarnations within a time-tangled life, is a straightforward, intelligent, perceptive human being with a great and charming spirit who has struggled mightily to find his place in the world and to discover the contribution he has to offer.