So, start with the voices, then.
It would be nice to say that these are the opening words of the novel if only because the voices are of such significance to the story. Alas, it is a complicated thing to identify what are technically the first lines. This quote is the opening one-sentence paragraph to Chapter One of Part One. But before the reader gets here, there is a short prefatory section titled “In the Beginning” followed by another short prefatory section titled “A Boy” but this is the first line with a section that includes an actual chapter number. Although the prefatory sections are important, this is really the best choice of them as an opening line because it is the voices that make the story unique.
The noises sounded like voices, coming from the shadows. They weren’t loud, just a low swelling ooooooooooοΟOOOOooooOOOoooo that were like ghosts or people moaning, but softly so no one would hear. Annabelle often moaned at night. Sometimes he heard her crying, too, and it scared him, but this was different. He waited. He thought he could hear words tangled up inside the sounds, but he couldn’t understand them.
It is Benny who hears the voices. He is a teenager whose father has recently died. And is the onset of these voices that drives the narrative. The voices are not just disembodied sounds coming from nowhere, however, they belong to objects readily identifiable. Things like a shoe. Or a Christmas tree ornament. Or even odder things that usually do not have a whole lot to say people. And in some cases, the objects are things which one would not really expect to have too much of interest to say even if one could hear them. At first, the objects that are given voice suddenly are restricted to those things inside Benny’s home. Before too long, however, Benny can’t seem to go much of anywhere without something out there giving into the need for self-expression.
I’m used to being talked about, and I don’t mind, as long as it’s not a bunch of stupid doctors trying to figure out how to fix me. It’s better this way, because parts of my story, like how my mom and dad met, happened before I was born or when I was too young to remember, and there are other parts I’d rather just forget. So it’s fine with me if the Book does most of the talking. Basically, I think it’s a sincere book and pretty reliable, and it doesn’t mind if I jump in and interrupt sometimes to express an opinion.
Parts of the book, obviously, are narrated by Benny. But it really is not quite that simple. That suggests that the there is a back and forth between the third-person narration and the first-person sections narrated by Benny. But that third-person part is kind of misleading. Because what is really going on is that there is Benny’s narration and there is the book narrating Benny’s story which only seems like it is just an anonymous third-person observational narrator. And that is what Benny is talking about here. And, as if to confirm that Benny is not completely mental, the opening line of the next “third-person” section starts out with “It takes a lot of courage for a boy to trust a book to tell his own story, so thank you for that.”
