Writing a novel with a wounded main character can be difficult, especially if the writer also feels wounded by life. Such writers risk writing a novel to transport the author to a place where he or she experiences healing. This is inner storytelling and not meant to transport an audience.

The problem arises when a character is so wounded they are either unable to act or appear to readers to be unable to act.

Prince of Tides, by Pat Conroy, opens with four words, 'My wound is geography.' They introduce a main character who is wounded, and suggest the question, can this wounded character find healing? In four words Pat Conroy suggests the promise of his novel.

Another question here, what does geography have to do with the narrator's wound? To get the answer, the reader has to read the novel's second sentence. That's the prime directive of the first sentence of a novel.

The second sentence of the novel, 'It is also my anchorage my port of call.' This sentence tells us that what comforts the narrator is also what wounds him, i.e., it cannot be left behind easily. If the narrator could ignore this wound, it would not appear significant to the story's audience.

Continuing,

       'I grew up slowly beside the tides and marshes of Colleton; my arms were tawny and strong from working long days on the shrimp boat in the blazing South Carolina heat. Because I was a Wingo, I worked as soon as I could walk; I could pick a blue crab clean when I was five. I had killed my first deer by the age of seven, and at nine was regularly putting meat on my family's table. I was born and raised on a Carolina sea island and I carried the sunshine of the low-country, inked in dark gold, on my back and shoulders.'

What should be noted about these details is that they have a context, what made the narrator's home a sanctuary. These images speak to that. If the novel had begun, “I grew up slowly...' there would not be a context. When readers are offered details with no context, the reader has to memorize the details until the context becomes available. This can make reading a novel manuscript a chore, particularly after five pages.

Continuing,

        'When I was ten I killed a bald eagle for pleasure, for the singularity of the act, despite the divine, exhilarating beauty of its solitary flight over schools of whiting. It was the only thing I ever killed that I had never seen before. After my father beat me for breaking the law and for killing the last eagle in Colleton County, he made me build a fire, dress the bird, and eat its flesh as tears rolled down my face. Then he turned me in to Sheriff Benson, who locked me in a cell for over an hour. My father took the feathers and made a crude Indian headdress for me to wear to school. He believed in the expiation of son. I wore the headdress for weeks, until it began to disintegrate feather by feather. Those feather trailed me in the hallways of the school as though I were a molting, discredited angel.'

The context for these words goes back to what makes this place a wound for the narrator, that he's been brutalized by a father. Also note the difference between the narrator relating that he wore the headdress until it 'rotted off his head' and wearing it until it disintegrated and those 'feathers trailed me in the hallways of the school as though I were a molting, discredited angel.' This description allows us to feel more deeply this moment, to share it with the narrator. Writing that the 'feathers trailed me in the hallways of the school' is a collection of details. That this experience led the narrator to feel like he was a 'molting, discredited angel,' speaks to a truth about his life.

The death of the eagle here can also be seen as subtext about the death of another significant character later in the novel.

Continuing,

        'It was my mother who taught me the southern way of the spirit in its most delicate and intimate forms. My mother believed in the dreams of flowers and animals. Before we went to bed at night as small children, she would reveal to us in her storytelling voice that salmon dreamed of mountain passes and the brown faces of grizzlies hovering over clear rapid. Copperheads, she would say, dreamed of placing their fangs in the shinbones of hunters. Ospreys slept with their feathered, plummeting dreamselves screaming through deep, slow-motion dives toward herring. There were the brute wings of owls in the nightmares of ermine, the downwind approach of timber wolves in the night stillness of elk.'

The mother appears to be presented as the 'comforter,' but the subtext of all these stories is about predators and prey. The roles of the mother and children will be revealed as predator and prey as the story continues.

Continuing,

        'But we never knew about her dreams, for my mother kept us stranger to her own interior life. We knew that bees dreamed of roses, that roses dreamed of the pale hands of florists, and that spiders dreamed of luna moths adhered to silver webs. As her children, we were the trustees of her dazzling evensongs of the imaginations, but we did not know that mothers dreamed.'

It is the mother's dreams, more than the father's brutality, that will destroy the Wingo clan. Again, careful foreshadowing.

The author continues with a description of life on this sea island, then...

        'For years I did not have to face the demonology of my youth; I made a simple choice not to and found solace in the gentle palmistry of forgetfulness, a refuge in the cold, lordly glooms of the unconscious. But I was drawn back to the history of my family and the failures of my own adult life by a single telephone call.'

The call tells the narrator that his sister Savannah has attempted suicide for the second time. To save her, he must go back and remember the past he has chosen to bury and forget. At the end of the prologue he says,

        'I will tell you my story.

        Nothing is missing.

        I promise you.'

So ends the prologue and begins the phone call that changes Tom's life.

Each chapter in this novel can be viewed as a step forward along a story line and plot line; a story line about a wounded man dealing with his wound, and a plot about whether he can save both his sister, his marriage, and himself.

Prince of Tides is a powerful and haunting novel about a wounded man seeking healing. That promise is set out in four words.

        'My wound is geography.'

©2007 Bill Johnson