The Whale Belly

What does Alphra Behn’s Oroonoko teach us about writing fiction?

It’s considered a forerunner of the modern novel, the latter beginning with Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. One obvious reason it isn’t considered a novel itself is its relatively short length, but what also separates it from the form is the distance the reader is held from the plot and the development of the protagonist.

Oroonoko is narrated by a woman who is more representative of a section of her class than an individual herself. She represents those in the slaving class who believe civility and good manners are solutions to the woes of institutionalized racial slavery. She gossips with us, and shapes the narrative in a way to advance her worldview of the “noble savage.” Even with the all the dramatic events of the story — a king abducting his love, his capture by slavers, his leading of a failed slave revolt, the just murder of his love, his gruesome execution — they nonetheless feel inevitable, controlled, even contrived. It often feels like a long fairy tale, which may make it more like a romance than a novel or novella.

John Gardner wrote that over and above the nuts-and-bolts elements of a novel a writer must sustain a dream state in his readers. Crusoe and novels afterward — beginning especially, in my opinion, with Moll Flanders — place us directly within the emotional atmosphere of a protagonist’s struggle. We are able to follow along with a logical flow of events and choices. Even when a protagonist does something illogical, it’s still within our logical understanding of how even the most rational human beings are never entirely rational. But even though Prince Oroonoko makes many tragic mistakes throughout the novel, mostly because he is overly trustful of conniving slavers, for the most part he never really changes. He upholds his nobility to the very end. The most he changes is that he learns that some slave owners are bad people. But he almost never wavers in moral rectitude. He is, in short, unbelievable.

And maybe this is the real lesson here. A protagonist will seem flat, even in the most elaborately dramatic of events, if they seem to never falter. Prince Oroonoko is constantly having things happen to him, but he simply outclasses these things, strikes out at them in moral righteousness or simply refuses them disdainfully. The ending provides us with an apt image, as he casually smokes a pipe as he is dismembered piece by piece by his captors.