How can a single point-of-view novel include multiple voices?

This post touches on the ending of I Kissed Shara Wheeler.

In previous posts on Casey McQuiston’s I Kissed Shara Wheeler, I’ve looked at how the opening of the novel hooks readers and how McQuiston uses dialogue—especially the white spaces around dialogue—to reveal character. In this post, I’m going to focus on another white space McQuiston makes use of: the interstitial breaks between chapters, which they fill in with extraneous materials that illuminate corners of the fictional world that their single point-of-view character, Chloe Green, doesn’t have access to.

All of these excerpts are given the heading “From the Burn Pile”—a title we don’t learn the meaning of until the bonfire in the final chapter—and they are all quite short, most under a page. All of them are ‘found’ documents, the kind of detritus you would discover in a locker or backpack at the end of a school year: notes between characters, old homework assignments, scribbled exchanges on scripts, teacher evaluations, student council meeting minutes.

Our point-of-view character, Chloe Green, has an intense, dramatic personality, and we can hear her voice coming through on every page she narrates. Take, for example, this opening line to chapter five: “Chloe enters the choir room for lunch with a peanut butter sandwich in her lunch bag and murder in her heart.” Or this showstopper of a speech she delivers at a high school party:

If you want to stand up and cheer, I think that’s the effect McQuiston is going for.

But Chloe’s strong voice threatens to drown out quieter characters. McQuiston uses the Burn Pile material to showcase some of those other characters, as well as to provide documentary-style clues about emerging subplots. The first Burn Pile document, a note from Chloe to her friend Georgia, keeps us in Chloe’s POV but changes medium. The note—apparently sent during class because Chloe writes, “PLEASE DO NOT REACT you are calm you are a placid lake you are my moms after a pitcher of hemp tea”—delivers the news that we have already gleaned from the previous chapter: that Chloe was kissed by Shara Wheeler.

The next Burn Pile note also delivers a piece of information we already had—that Shara kissed Rory, her next door neighbor, in addition to Chloe—but this time from Rory’s point of view, using a transcript of one of the tapes he uses to record his music. It’s in first person and reveals his emotional reaction to the kiss: “It didn’t exactly feel like the earth-shattering moment I always thought it would, mostly because I was just … confused.” Without this Burn Pile material, we’d never know Rory’s interior reaction to the kiss since he’s established as the cool, aloof rebel, and it would be out of character for him to reveal this, especially to our point-of-view character Chloe, whom he doesn’t yet trust.

A later Burn Pile document—this one an excerpt from a creative writing assignment to describe a person with one word, written by Chloe’s friend Georgia—hints at a subplot that McQuiston will deploy at a dramatic moment late in the novel. Georgia writes, “There’s a girl with brown eyes who reminds me of the first book I ever loved. When I look at her, I feel like there might be another universe in her.” The excerpt, highlighted by Chloe’s annotation, “Who is this about????,” reveals that Georgia may have her own long-standing romantic obsession.

As the novel progresses, McQuiston moves farther away from the central characters in the Burn Pile documents. Showing passed notes between secondary characters and tertiary characters brings all of them to life, making the fictional world of Willowgrove Christian Academy feel layered and realistic. For example, the minutes of a student council meeting reveal the personalities and social standing of Brooklyn Bennett, the hyper-organized, micromanaging student council president, and April Butcher, a stoner friend of Rory’s. The header tells us the minutes were “extracted from the back of Brooklyn’s accordion folder (the pink one, not the green one)” and the minutes include these lines:

It’s funny, of course, but also sheds a light on the many tiny rebellions and power plays afoot at the school, which Chloe will succeed in tapping into in the triumphant conclusion of the novel.

Perhaps the most moving of these documents gives us a brief glimpse inside the head of Mr. Truman, the longtime drama teacher at Willowgrove. Chloe, convinced he is gay, wonders why he teaches at a school that requires him to either forgo or hide any long-term romantic relationship. The discarded draft of a self-evaluation that ends up on the Burn Pile gives us a clue.

The piece starts off with his musing about the Kevin Bacon movie Tremors, in which the main character sees a hard hat full of brains twenty minutes into the movie. “In the real world,” Mr. Truman writes, “if you happened to see somebody’s brains by accident, it would mess you up. The whole movie would be about the fact that you saw somebody’s brains.” He notes that by middle age, it’s easy to forget how your own seeing-the-brains moment felt, but when you are in high school “the brains are everything.” He’s concluded that God’s plan for his life is for him to “keep some kids from seeing the brains. Or at least showing them something in the desert that isn’t brains. A cool cactus, maybe. I don’t know. Metaphors are hard. I’m not the literature teacher.” This tiny glimpse into Mr. Truman’s interior life allows us to imagine, then, just how meaningful it must be when Chloe, giving a graduation speech about specific moments that have shaped her sense of who she is, finds Mr. Truman in the crowd and directs this line at him: “The moment a teacher told us they believed in us.” Without the seemingly extraneous Burn Pile document, the line would have much less emotional resonance.

As you are reading them, these Burn Pile documents can seem like throwaway bits of lighthearted fun, but when you sift through them and lay the contents up against the plot, themes, and narrative structure of the novel, you’ll find that McQuiston has put more meaning into them than you can catch on a first read. It’s a clever strategy easily adaptable to a wide range of stories.

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