The perfectly ordinary protagonist

Of the novels and plays I've read, I find it surprisingly difficult to identify a 'ordinary' protagonist, let alone one I enjoyed. Oppen Porter's meandering journey for wisdom and self, to became a 'man of the world,' seems similar to Holden Caufield's similar quest, particularly since both are on the verge of being insane. The protagonist of Catcher in the Rye, however, is savagely comic from the beginning of the novels, wittily destroying everything and himself to avoid being 'phony.' Oppen's narration happens to have a similar wit: the first sentence is itself sufficient evidence, and, to add to that, on the next page he uses the understated 'stiffens the vitality' to describe the effect of holding onto vitality. More often than not, however, Oppen attributes the standout phrases in his narration. Occasionally, we see ironies in these phrases that Oppen is unaware of, so that he doesn’t fully understand the phrases, but by and large attribution seems merely to reflective his moral character: while JB, who pretends that he has invented his ideas, has, in fact absorbed nothing, the words have touched Oppen’s core, and nevertheless chooses to emphasize that they are not his.

The contrast between Oppen and JB serves to indicate two senses of ‘ordinariness:’ Oppen is moderately aware and moderately intelligent, remaining undistinguished, but JB has no moral integrity and, to add to that, is viciously self-deceptive. Sustaining a 300-page narrative about JB would be impossible to read, certainly: viewed from the outside, we are able to assimilate JB into a few character traits without necessarily understanding how his internal consciousness functions. Now imagine exploring his psychology: as a result of self-deception, an accurate storyteller should not give us a self-aware internal drama; instead, we would be left with his trite and highly tendentious religious beliefs, muddled because of his lack of understanding.

Oppen presents himself as a partially convincing ‘ordinary’ character because, in a not too distinguished way, his story is one of moral fortitude: he is willing to function as a ‘shield,’ for instance, and defends ‘advanced thinking.’ And yet, Wilson’s desire to make him ordinary does seem to make him a duller than necessary. His isolation is not at all as complete as, for instance, Jake’s because of his dependence of Paul, while the source of his wisdom sometimes seems muddled: do the minor epiphanies, which I found less interesting than his narration, really make him the wiser, experienced man in hospital? I am not too sure.