Why The Moonstone Has So Many Narrators

In Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, Rachel Verinder receives a yellow diamond on her eighteenth birthday. By morning it has vanished. Sergeant Cuff investigates the theft, but the story reaches us through a series of written accounts that Franklin Blake asks people connected to the case to contribute. Each person knows a piece of what happened. Each also has ideas about what deserves to be remembered.

That arrangement makes The Moonstone a detective novel you can investigate as you read. A change of narrator can make an earlier scene look different even before a new clue turns up.

Franklin Blake sets a rule the witnesses keep testing

Franklin asks contributors to stay within their personal experience. The rule sounds simple until a witness starts explaining why someone acted strangely. Seeing a person leave a room is one kind of evidence. Learning from someone else where they went is another. Deciding what they meant to do is a judgment. Collins lets all three turn up in the same account, sometimes delivered with equal confidence.

The prologue also gives the diamond a history before it reaches Rachel. It was taken from India, and its disappearance in England is only one episode in its journey. As you read the household accounts, notice how narrow the question of who took it from Rachel can sound beside the question of how it came to be hers.

Betteredge knows the household and has loyalties within it

Gabriel Betteredge, the Verinders’ longtime steward, makes a good first guide because he knows the people whose routines the theft disrupts. He can tell when someone behaves unusually because he knows what an ordinary day looks like for them. That familiarity is part of his value as a witness. It also gives him reasons to explain away behavior that an outsider might find suspicious.

His devotion to Robinson Crusoe makes this tendency funny and easy to spot. Betteredge consults the book when he needs advice and finds wisdom in it for almost any situation. It’s a small example of how readily he fits new experiences into a way of seeing the world he already trusts.

Miss Clack brings a different set of assumptions

Miss Clack’s account changes the feel of the investigation. She hands out religious tracts and interprets other people’s conduct through her own ideas about virtue and duty. What she considers worth recording tells us as much about her priorities as it does about the people she describes.

Her account is especially fun to read for the gap between an action and her verdict on it. When she describes offering someone a tract, pay attention to how the person responds before you take her explanation of that response. Collins gives you room to read the social encounter differently while still taking the details she records seriously.

How to read the accounts without spoiling the mystery

Try separating what a narrator saw, what they heard from someone else, and what they inferred. You can do it in your head. Start with one moment when a witness seems especially sure about somebody else’s motives. Then ask what you would know if you stripped away the explanation and kept only the observed action.

If a later narrator makes you think differently about a scene, go back to the earlier account and see exactly what the first witness put on the page. Often the pleasure is realizing that you supplied an assumption of your own.

Where to read The Moonstone

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

For a paperback with notes, try The Moonstone on Amazon, edited by Sandra Kemp. You can also read the complete novel free at Project Gutenberg.

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