“The Fifth Season” by N. K. Jemisin: As paracosm begins, reader is told to be the protagonist, Essun, a female “orogene” with a split personality

Paracosm

This award-winning novel is a detailed imaginary world: a paracosm (1). Creating paracosms, like acquiring new languages, is easier, and comes more naturally, in childhood. Some writers, like the Brontë siblings, wrote paracosms in childhood, but regular novels as adults. Other writers, like N. K. Jemisin, publish paracosms as adults.

Questions about the writing process: Has an adult personality elaborated a paracosm that originated in the author’s childhood? Or has the childhood personality who originated the paracosm grown up, and is telling the story as an adult? Or is the narrative voice of this adult novel a precocious, child-aged, alternate personality? Most novelists probably have more than one personality involved in their writing process.

I note the narrator’s use of an adolescent word like “leaderish”: “The Black Star is where the leaders of the empire meet to do their leaderish things” (2, p. 3). Of course, there are other possible reasons to use a word like that, but the context here is the paracosm, which is rooted in childhood.

Split Personality

On page one, the protagonist is described as having two personalities: “her bitter, weary self” and “her bewildered, shocked self” (2, p. 1). The former is talking to the latter, and since what she says is printed in italics, it appears that the latter is hearing the former as a voice in her head (search “italics” for related past posts).

Reader as Protagonist

The protagonist’s name is Essun. She is an “orogene.” She is Jija’s wife. But the most surprising thing about her is: “You are she. She is you. You are Essun. Remember? The woman whose son is dead. You’re an orogene who’s been living in the little nothing town of Tirimo for ten years” (2, p. 15).

An adult reader might ordinarily sympathize with a protagonist and see things from her point of view, but here the reader is supposed to be Essun, the protagonist. Why might this narrator consider that a reasonable expectation?

Imaginative children can be another person, like a superhero. So is this narrator a child personality, who, as a child, assumes that the reader, too, can be another person?

I’m only up to page 18 in this 465-page novel (including glossary), so these speculations are based only on first impressions and are tentative.

1. Wikipedia. “Paracosm.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracosm

2. N. K. Jemisin. The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth: Book One). New York, Orbit Hachette, 2015.