My Name is Jerry Ryan

One of my friends told me that he would have liked my books Full Filler and Fill Fuller better if I had used my real name instead of a pen name.

I cut him off before he went any further.

I explained that if I used my pen name than everything that I wrote would be semi-fictional because the implied author of the book was Ice Rivers who himself was not real which left me free to embellish or confess with equal facility/indistinguishability.

He nodded his head.

We had a couple more beers and a few "I love ya bro"sentiments as we moved on to where Tyson Fury ranked on the list of all time heavyweight champs.

My explanation for pen name had satisfied him but not convinced either him nor myself. Then again, I wasn't trying to win an argument.

Let's take it a little deeper.

It's a poorly kept secret that my name is Jerry Ryan. Also probably pretty clear that I used to teach English.

My story is similar but different from the story of Ice Rivers. I'm not in the books.

The whole thing is a departure from my past writings. I considered myself an essayist. I've discovered differently.

I got sick and wanted to tell my story but I wanted to keep it private. I invented Ice Rivers to narrate my story, I had stumbled into the fertile field of narratology. Narratology is literally and figuratively a field of dreams.

According to Wayne Booth (who may or may not be real), narratolgy is fictional narrative disguised as rhetorical truth. In other words, it's kayfabe. It's method acting. It's professional wrestling. It's knowing your role and staying in it even as you create and change your role according to the perception of your audience.

Within narratology, the author is never simply the person who wrote the text (Jerry Ryan). The author is determined by who tells the narrative. This figure can be imagined as the Holy Trinity, the actual author, the implied author and the narrator.

The actual author (Jerry) doesn't show up in the text itself. The actual author constructs a version of himself (Ice) and communicates through that construction infinite choices and conflicts that may be conscious, intellectual, physical, emotional or even subconscious and surreal. The author may utilize several versions of himself into his creativity. The implied author for most of my work is Ice Rivers and occasionally Thornton Krell.

Finally there is the narrator who differs from the real author because he/she is part of the story world within the narration; sometimes a heterdiegetic (omniscient) narrator who sees everything from above or a homodiegetic character who is a characer in the story and relating events and feelings from his/her participation in them. Both Ice Rivers and Thronton Krell serve these purposes within the worlds of Full Filler and Fill Fuller.

Although I have one major implied author....Ice Rivers....I have several narrators who are barely distinguishable from one another. Where does Ice Rivers end and Thornton Krell begin?

All of this collides with the Trinity of audience which one of us either Rivers or Krell will get to at another time as "English teacher mode" has taken up enough of your time and attention.

I didn't bother to go into all of this when my friend made his observation about my (Jerry) pen name (Ice). We had beer to drink, sports to discuss and jokes to tell. 

Nobody needed or wanted a smarty pants.

If you're still awake.

Stay Tuned.