Disrupted Empathy in Megan Whalen Turner’s The Thief

Let me begin by making two things crystal clear.

Firstly, I love Megan Whalen Turner’s The Queen’s Thief series. I would not want some of my criticisms of the first book in that series to obscure that fact; it is an ingeniously plotted series with elegant, lucid prose that sparkles on every page.

Secondly, you SHOULD NOT READ THIS POST IF YOU HAVE NOT READ THE THIEF. Just don’t do it. Stop. Turn around. Hit that back button. And don’t come back until you’ve done your homework, you little rascal.

With that said, let’s dive right into the first page of The Thief. Below is the first paragraph in its entirety:

“I didn't know how long I had been in the King's prison. The days were all the same except that as each one passed, I was dirtier than before. every move thing the light in the cell changed from the wavering orange of the lamp in the sconce outside my door to the dim but even glow of the sun falling into the prisons central courtyard. In the evening, as the sunlight faded, I reassured myself that I was one day closer to getting out. To pass time, I concentrated on pleasant memories, laying them out in order and examining them carefully. I reviewed over and over the plans that had seemed so straightforward before I arrived in jail, and I swore to myself and every God I knew that if I got out alive, I would never never never take any risks that were so abysmally stupid again.”

This paragraph immediately highlights one important aspect of this novel that sets it apart from anything else I have written about on this blog so far—it is in first-person. And first-person narration is very interesting from a phenomenological point-of-view! This is especially true as first-person narration complicates the ways in which a narrative can invite us to empathize with (or even identify with) a character. If you have not yet read my Heideggerian analysis of Brandon Sanderson’s evocation of empathy I’d recommend that you do so here (https://www.fcclay.com/post/being-with-and-being-as-in-brando-sando) for context. In that post, I introduce the terms: being-with, being-there-with, and being-there-as. That final term (an innovation of my own) refers to how, in reading a novel, we sometimes experience the world of the novel through the lens of a particular character to such a degree that it feels like we have (on some level, for just a few minutes) actually become that character.

So, then, does first-person narration, like the kind we receive in the paragraph above, make such being-there-as more or less difficult?

The answer might at first seem to be obviously: yes. We have such intimate access to Eugenides’ point of view! We are immediately immersed in Eugenides’ experience of the passage of time. Our entry into the novel’s world happens exclusively through Eugenides’ characterological lens. We are given no access to the broader world of the Lesser Peninsula other than through Eugenides’ life-world.[1] Surely, this kind of persistent closeness to Eugenides as a character will almost certainly lead the reader to be-there-as Eugenides. And indeed, at least in my own experience, it does.

And that’s how Megan Whalen Turner gets you.

She certainly got me. She got me good. And, if I’m being completely honest, it was somewhat irritating. This, by the way, is the point at which things get spoilery. I am now going to offer first a criticism and then a defense of Turner’s narratological shenanigans in The Thief. Turner lures the reader into identifying closely with the first-person narrator of The Thief, but by the story’s end the reader will suddenly find that the person with whom they thought they were identifying for the entire story does not exist at all! The false Gen is supplanted by the real Eugenides who was hiding behind a façade all along.

Eugenides is an unreliable narrator, and there is a longstanding and proud tradition of unreliable first-person narrators in western fiction, with Edgar Allan Poe’s creepy character narrators being perhaps the most quintessential exemplar. What is more, Turner, very much to her credit, has (as far as I’ve been able to notice) left no holes in her narrative. Everything that Eugenides says simultaneously deceives us and is completely true. Consider this quotation from the paragraph above:

“In the evening, as the sunlight faded, I reassured myself that I was one day closer to getting out. To pass time, I concentrated on pleasant memories, laying them out in order and examining them carefully. I reviewed over and over the plans that had seemed so straightforward before I arrived in jail…”

Everything here fits perfectly with the cover story that Eugenides tells to the magus, about being an expert thief thrown in jail for boasting too boldly about his expertise. It lets us know that his being arrested was not entirely an accident, but it is not until the end of the book that we can look back at these sentences and realize that Eugenides is, in fact, contemplating his plan to get arrested as a precursor to getting hired to steal Hamiathe’s gift.

But it is this truth-telling that sets Eugenides apart from other unreliable narrators like Poe’s. Poe’s narrators mis-tell the story, usually because they are pants-on-head bonkers. Other unreliable narrators deliberately conceal facts or misrepresent things because they want to trick their readers for one reason or another. And that is my criticism of The Thief. Eugenides has ample reason for deceiving the magus and everyone else in his little party, but he has no real reason at all for tricking the reader. It is as if the deceptiveness of the narrative is nothing but an accident—a trick of chance.

Granted, the reveal is incredibly clever and quite fun! However, it also comes at a cost. Turner’s skill as a writer led me to begin empathizing and identifying quite strongly with the person who I thought Gen was. I put a lot of imaginative (even ethical) work into building that bond of understanding. And then I was played for a fool, because the character whom I had grown to love turned out to be a mere chimera. And I found that somewhat unsatisfying as a reader. I felt (fairly, to a degree) cheated by Turner’s scheme. It felt, perhaps, more clever than fruitful.

This experience contrast sharply, by the way, with my experience of other books in the series. Consider, for instance, The King of Attolia. That book is not told through first-person narration, but I feel so close to Costis’s point of view that, just now, I almost misremembered and thought that the book was written in first person! However, this closeness with Costis builds a bond between me and a character who does not turn out to be a fundamentally different person than I had been led to believe, while at the same time facilitating some excellent reveals and trickery! This is because, in The King of Attolia, Turner has led me to be-there-as a character who is witness to the trickery, rather than the agent of it. I get to be deceived alongside the point of view character rather than by the point of view character.

However, despite my above critique, I think there is also an interesting possible defense of Turner’s chicanery, particularly in relation to the way she cultivates and then disrupts empathy. As I have made clear in previous posts, the phenomenon of being-there-as is possible only within the pages of a book. You will never be-there-as me, and I will never be-there-as you. And forgetting that fact can be dangerous.

Husserl describes the possibility of encountering another person as being made possible by “apperception.” Apperception is what happens when you see the front of a tree, and, without thinking about it, naturally intuit the presence of the rest of the tree that you can’t actually see in that moment, because you’ve seen a lot of trees and other 3-D objects before. Husserl argues that, in the same way, I intuit the presence of a vivid consciousness behind the appearance of your body because of my familiarity with, in essence, myself. This basic recognition of other minds can then be expanded through further identifying-with to arrive at not only recognition of others but also empathizing with others. However, Levinas differs greatly from Husserl in his thinking about the way we meet others. For Levinas, it is above all else the alterity of others (their otherness, their not being me) that defines my consciousness of them. In fact, Levinas goes so far as to argue that my sense of myself actually derives from my awareness of others—a complete inversion of Husserl’s idea! As a result, many followers of Levinas today consider empathy-through-identification to be innately flawed. These thinkers believe that if we start to feel empathy for someone by imagining them to be like us, then we end up only empathizing with an imagined projection of ourself rather than with a truly “other” person.[2]

The experience of reading The Thief might highlight this danger of empathizing via identifying-with. In imagining the person whom I thought Eugenides to be and developing an intense bond for that person, I essentially enacted the fallacy that the Levinasians fear. I imagined a person into being and began to feel for that person, only to then find that that person was just a projection of my imagination all along. Perhaps Turner’s book can be appreciated in part as an implicit cautionary tale—a warning against overhasty imagining of others. Imagination is a powerful tool, with great potential for goodness but an equal and opposite potential for harm, and it is wise to remember that there are limitations to how much I can truly understand others.

As frustrating as it might be to fall in love with the false front of a fictional character, it is far, far more painful to commit that very same error in our daily lives. Making mistakes in fiction is always a more pleasant way to learn than making mistakes in the school of hard knocks.

So, perhaps, I have much to thank The Thief for after all.[3]

[1] What is a life-world, you ask? Excellent question. A life-world is the sum total experience of your day-to-day consciousness of reality; a life-world is your (and my) unique lens onto reality. To put it another way, a life-world is how the world is to me. [2] While I see some validity in these concerns, I also think that such criticisms tend to be overblown. Guarding against narcissism in our empathy is important, but at the same time understanding others by remembering that they, like us, have their own unique life-world is a necessary step towards empathy and, beyond that, love. [3] And I know that I have much to thank Megan Whalen Turner for because I love her books! In fact, here is my personal ranking of every book in The Queen’s Thief series based exclusively on how much I personally like them. In order from “I adore it!” to “it’s quite good”: The Queen of Attolia, The King of Attolia, Thick as Thieves, The Return of the Thief, A Conspiracy of Kings, The Thief.