Freida McFadden uses two primary narrators in The Intruder: She opens the novel with a chapter labeled “Casey – Now,” then we shift to “Ella – Before” in chapter four. Both POVs are delivered in first person, present tense, a choice that helps readers step inside the mind and experiences of each narrator. I think this choice is one secret to McFadden’s success; readers show up for the visceral thrills and want to feel them as deeply as possible. McFadden’s surprise twists are another big reason for the popularity of her novels. The twists are the payoff; this post is about the setup that makes them work. And a lot of that setup happens through character description—who Ella notices, what she notices, and what those observations tell us about her. There are no spoilers in this post—I’ll save those for my next post, on the structure of the entire novel. (You can read my analysis of the opening chapter here.)
I picked chapter four to study because, first, it’s going to be key to the surprise twist much later in the novel, and, second, it’s a good opportunity to study the way character description functions as a scene component, since we meet our POV character, Ella, for the first time as well as her middle-school principal and two fellow students who are going to play important roles in her story arc. Let’s start with our usual overview of which scene components McFadden is using in the chapter.
Character description dominates at 31 percent, with interiority at 27 percent, action at 16 percent, dialogue at 15 percent, summary at 5 percent, and finally both setting and backstory at 3 percent. So it’s a scene where character description dominates but, as we will see, other components like action and dialogue are also used to fill out our perception of a character.
Here’s the first line of the chapter: “It is barely more than halfway through the school year, and this is already my sixth visit to the principal’s office.” Ella is challenging us to see her as a “troublemaker,” as Principal Garber clearly does. She even begins by seeming sympathetic to his position: “He has a lot of students—a whole freaking middle school to worry about—so it’s a pain in the butt when he gets repeat offenders.” She also admits that she “got caught. Again,” seeming to confirm his assessment of her.
But as the scene goes on, Ella begins to subtly undercut him by noticing unflattering details: his comb-over sliding over his sweaty forehead, a crumb caught in the corner of his mouth, his stubbly chin. Paired with his “stern voice,” his “frown,” and his dialogue lines, these details give us the impression of an aging, clueless administrator who does not have the intuition or empathy to dig farther into why Ella has been repeatedly caught stealing other students’ lunches.
Here is what the scene teaches us about character description: It’s never neutral. Rather, it’s filtered through the values, assumptions, hopes, and fears of the point-of-view character. We’re getting a purely external impression of Principal Garber, and readers only have access to what Ella notices and chooses to relay to us. Her goal in the scene is not to understand who the principal is or what he wants. Her goal is to hide her own true self from Garber, while also trying to deflect the troublemaker label he’s pinned on her.
If the portrayal of Garber comes to us entirely from the outside, the portrayal of Ella herself works the opposite way. We don’t get a lot of information in this chapter about Ella’s appearance—in some ways, perhaps, Garber can see the kid sitting in front of him more clearly than we can. However, what readers do get is access to Ella’s interiority, especially the thoughts she is sharing with us and withholding from him. That information gap increases the tension of the scene, but it also has the effect of allying us with our narrator.
Let’s look at how this works. One of the few external details we learn about Ella is that she is skinny, maybe even underweight for her age. She notes that the unpadded seat hurts her butt, which also “has no padding.” Later in the chapter she mentions in passing that other girls in her grade have boobs but she doesn’t yet. During the conversation with Garber, she tells him that she’d thought the lunch she took was her own, but she reveals to us that “I knew it wasn’t my own lunch, because I didn’t bring mine today. I almost never bring anything. But Garber doesn’t know that.” Later in the conversation she notes that she didn’t even get to eat the lunch she stole before being hauled into the principal’s office and that even the sight of the crumb on Garber’s mouth makes her hungry. Added all together, we get a picture of a kid who is malnourished, not acting out.
The physical clues point to what is wrong; the next clues we get via Ella’s interiority start to tell us why. Where are the adults in her life and why are they failing her? To start, Ella reveals that she’s never met her father. This fact generates our sympathy but the way in which she delivers this bit of character description carries extra meaning: “I don’t have as much experience with adult men being disappointed with me, because I don’t have a father. I mean, I have a father—obviously—but I’ve never met him, so he’s never had a chance to be disappointed in me.” There’s a hint of self-pity in the last phrase but the overall thrust is to convey that Ella has plenty of experience with adult women being disappointed in her.
This hint means that we are on high alert when we come to a mention of Ella’s mother, which comes via Ella’s interiority after Garber suggests she could apply for food assistance if she’s hungry: “My mother would never allow that. She would rather me never eat ever again until I turned into a walking skeleton than apply for a program meant for poor kids.” There is one final clue for us to puzzle over. Ella tells Garber that their fridge at home is so full “you literally couldn’t even fit anything else in it.” Garber seems to take this assertion at face value and drops his questioning about whether Ella has enough food. However, readers get more information than Garber via Ella’s interiority: “It’s the first true statement I have made since I have been in this room. If Garber actually opened up my refrigerator at home, he would get it.” Garber isn’t going to get it but there’s a promise that we readers will.
Let’s turn now to the other two characters introduced in this scene, Ella’s classmates Anton and Brittany. Once again, the descriptions reveal almost as much about Ella as they do about the other kids. Anton is sitting outside Garber’s office when Ella leaves after receiving a week of detention. Here is how McFadden describes him:
Anton has spiky green hair—totally a home dye job with supplies he bought at the drugstore, based on the way the green is leaking onto the back of his neck—and he is picking at a huge hole in the knee of his blue jeans. He doesn’t look nervous, because out of everyone else in the school, Anton is the only kid who has been to the principal more times than I have this year.
The hair and ripped jeans suggest he an iconoclast, perhaps a rebel. When McFadden adds dialogue and action to the mix—a sneer, a rude comment—the portrait of a typical middle-school bully comes into focus. And yet Ella notices that though Anton is there for fighting, the kid he was fighting with hasn’t been called to the principal’s office. The observation is enough to make readers wonder if Anton has been unfairly labeled just as Ella has.
Brittany is set up as a foil to these two troublemakers. Ella describes Brittany as “basically Snow White come to life” in appearance and she’s similarly perfect in every other way; she has “tons of friends,” “all the teachers love her,” and “she gets straight A’s without being a big nerd.” When Brittany greets Ella by name, Ella reflects, “I’m always surprised when she knows who I am. It’s kind of like a celebrity knowing my name.” And yet Brittany delivers a scornful sniff when Ella asks why she’s been called to the principal’s office; she is there not because she’s in trouble but because her mother is picking her up early. There is also a hint of past conflict: Ella notes that, four years later, she is still hurt at being the only one in their grade not invited to Brittany’s fourth-grade birthday party—which perhaps tells us as much about Ella’s ability to hold a grudge as it does about Brittany’s character.
Middle school status hierarchies are as visible and unbending as those of a royal court, and we know immediately where all four of the characters in this scene rank: the authority figure, the bully, the dream girl, the misfit. (If you are hearing the closing monologue of The Breakfast Club in your head right now—“a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal”—I see you, fellow Gen Xer.) McFadden uses character description—reinforced by action, dialogue, and Ella’s interiority—to establish those roles.
At first, it seems that Brittany represents what Ella wishes she could be, while Anton represents what she fears she is. And yet the undercurrents of the scene—Brittany’s haughtiness, the hint that Anton may be scapegoated—pull in a different direction. Readers can see what Ella herself is only beginning to: that Brittany is not the role model she should aspire to, and that Anton represents a potential ally rather than an enemy. The last line of the chapter shows Ella taking that first step—recognizing the one thing she and Anton share—and points toward the way this triangle will keep shifting: “I look up and discover Anton has been watching our interaction. For a split second, our eyes meet, but then he rubs at his sore right cheekbone and looks away. At least I’m not the only one here who’s a troublemaker.“
Has Ella accepted that label for herself? Do we accept it? Those are questions McFadden wants readers to keep asking through the final moments of the novel, and I’ll return to them in my post on the overall structure of The Intruder.
No spoilers in the comments, please! If you want to discuss the full plot of the novel, you can do so at the all-the-spoilers discussion post.
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