Choice and Consequence in Percival Everett’s ‘James’

Thoughts on the craft and craftiness of some contemporary literary fiction

There are many reasons that James is a compelling and engrossing novel. Percival Everett’s style in James features active scenes where dialogue is prominent and a sense of movement dominates the story. Things are always happening. And those things have consequence.

And as much as Everett is painting the picture of a deeply thoughtful and intelligent man in the protagonist, the balance of the narrative leans heavily toward action and interaction so that James seems to be doing things and saying things more than he is thinking on the page. (James is arguably more active and action-oriented than a Lee Childs novel.)

This compositional orientation generates a strong sense of immediacy. James is historical fiction, but the qualities of the work make it not just contemporary but present. The short chapters in James create a palpable sense of pace and also, notably, each of the short chapters ends with the protagonist in a new situation, making it a model text for scene writing as an element of narrative. These stylistic elements go a long way to making James as captivating and as gripping as it is. But the most compelling stylistic element in Everett’s great novel is the centrality of character choice.

Choice is a fusion of character and plot. It exists at a potent cross-section of the reader’s imagination and engagement with a narrative, where a character’s thinking is elevated from reaction into action, driving the story forward through a positive agency in the character. When the protagonist is presented with a moment of choice, they possess a special sort of power to determine what will happen next. And this feels different for the reader than watching a character navigate a series of events through reaction, where circumstances create a necessary chain of cause-and-effect for the story and its people.

Everett depicts James as a man forced to make a hard choice at the beginning of the story. He is a slave and he discovers that he is going to be sold and separated from his family. He thinks about what this will mean for him, for his life, for his family. And he realizes that there are a few things he can do. He chooses the most active path and runs away so that he will maintain some control over his whereabouts. This triggers a series of events, but as they unfold Jim is consistently put in a position of choice and therefore power. At each turn in the plot of the story, James faces choices that are articulated to a level where the reader understands the possible outcomes of selecting one path over another. The result is a very immediate sense of stakes for the story. And it also means that James occupies the status of active agent within the story. He is an incredibly active protagonist. But this method of storytelling also invites the reader to consider the “what if” alternative possibilities for the protagonist.

Sherry Kramer talks about the power and value of character choice in *Writing for Stage and Screen. She describes stories as following a pattern of this happened and then this next thing happened and points out that moments of distinct choice for the characters generate a special kind of imaginative play in the mind of the reader, giving meaning to a sequence of events. Distinct moments of choice create a set of branching possibilities that have a powerful effect on the audience because the “what if is a structured form of hope. At each moment when the and then creates the most robust what if, we can see the alternative cascade of consequences that would have resulted from a different choice” (109). Everett’s James is often creating “the most robust what if*.”

There is a moment in James where Everett ends a chapter with his protagonist James facing a profound set of options. Without spoiling the story, we can look at the moment where a steamboat has exploded and James is flung into a river, surrounded by bodies and flailing, drowning people. He searches for the man who he has been traveling with — the man who James had coerced into getting on the boat, a man who cannot swim. And at the moment he spots that man clinging to a plank of wood, soon to go under, James sees Huckleberry Finn in the water. Huck calls out to him, this boy James has known all the child’s life and who he has been separated from on the road. Huck needs to be saved too. And James can only save one of them.

This moment in the story is a culmination of at least two storylines in the narrative and it leads directly into the novel’s biggest revelation, which is also functionally the culmination of another storyline. It’s big. It feels huge. It feels so entirely appropriate for the story and so fully immersive in its layering of morality, relationship, and story. And part of the reason for this is that it is James’ choices that have created this moment. He didn’t blow up the steam ship, but his choices put his friend Norman in the water. His choice to allow Huck Finn to travel with him brought Huck to this place too. And in this moment, he is forced to choose again. The choice is active. It is not a binary between doing something and doing nothing. It’s not a binary of active and passive roles for the protagonist. It’s active either way.

The distinctness of James’ choice in this climactic moment makes it stand out as a memorable episode in the story, but the presence of choice carries through the novel. The protagonist weighs his options often and Everett puts them on the page. Sherry Kramer’s claims that character choice causes change, creates a sense of “nextness,” and creates a sense of participation in the audience (104), are all thoroughly proved in James. There is a strong sense of anticipation of possible and predicted outcomes that spring — not from circumstances, but from active choices the protagonist has made. The story leans forward into the near future at all times. And this generates what Kramer refers to as hope (104), which she says is invoked when “a choice’s costs and consequences have been made known to us”:

What we hope for is precious to us. Our hope means something to us, and we transfer that value and meaning to the work we are watching. When our hope is engaged in a play or film, it is alive in us. Each choice a character makes is nested in our hopes, either for it or against it. […] We don’t have to care about a character as long as we care about what she wants. As long as we hope that she gets it or doesn’t, we are paying attention and looking forward.

Seeing character choice in this way can connect us to craft advice about character desire and the importance of drawing characters who have clear goals.

The target of that advice is audience engagement. The reader is invited to care about the plot of a story when they know what the character wants, which is a momentous piece of advice because it shows us that lasting and deep audience engagement with plot often comes from active characters, people who provide the audience with possible futures to anticipate, to desire or to fear.

Character choice may elevate these anticipations a half-step or a full step. Because the reader is not only aware of one binary set of possibilities in the story (success or failure for the protagonist). The reader is aware of many forking paths of possibility that the character faces through the story and invited to consider the consequences of actions not taken. By moving past desire into an active engagement with a character’s decision making process, the story becomes rich with possibility. The what-ifs, once imagined, remain active. And the reader experiences a narrative world of action and consequence, which we can contrast to a world of simpler cause-and-effect or action and reaction.

Privileging the Reader

The authorial choice to center character choice in the narrative is also a way of privileging the reader, to use a mantra from Rob Roberge.

According to this way of thinking, giving the reader knowledge creates the possibility of a whole host of positive things: anticipation, sympathy and empathy, subtext, irony. In short, privileging the reader means involving the reader. And maybe that leads to the potentially obvious but still useful craft insight that the more you put the reader inside the story (inside its situations and its characters) the more invested they will be in the story’s outcome. One potent way to achieve that is to center character choice in the narrative.

We might see that insight in these lines from James: “He could have gone through life without the knowledge I had given him and he would have been no worse off for it. But I understood at that moment that I had shared the truth with him for myself. I needed for him to have a choice”(264). The character’s choices are, by necessity, the vicarious choices of the audience. This leads to a key takeaway: by emphasizing character choice, the reading experience is made active.