The Rule of Four
I found a paper I wrote in high school the other and day scanned through it. I focused most on the comment at the end:
“Your conclusion has fabulous insights. We’re just missing your voice— how your experiences and the literature have shaped your opinion.”
The teacher wants my opinion? Who particularly cares what a 15 year old thinks about Herman Hesse’s Siddartha? I certainly had an opinion (as it’s natural to have opinions), but what’s the value in voicing it? What if it’s wrong, flawed, and off the mark? Is it a greater risk to be right and silent, or wrong and outspoken? It depends on the subject I guess.
I read The Rule of Four in 2004 and then again in 2009. During the first pass, the book’s setting to me was unknown, but something I was about to step into, college life. In the tale, uncertainty and doubt cast a cloud over the protagonist, Tom, as he attempts to navigate the waters of his personal life and obligations to scholarship.
In first person fiction the author often constructs a world where an uncertain narrator experiences a world that is all too certain. The Rule of Four is no exception. Tom’s roommates have made the most of their Princeton experience, each in their own way: one is the president of an eating club, another going to medical school, while another is doing research that literally no one else can. Tom on the other hand has little to show for his time and nothing but uncertainty awaiting him after he graduates. While it seems most everyone around him has found their voice, Tom has yet to find his own.
Authors write books that readers can identify with. So it’s at once expected and a little cliché for me to admit that I could identify with Tom. Often in school, I’d ask myself the bigger question, what am I working towards? Punctuating the doubt was a sense that most of my peers had already settled on their own answers to that question and were executing a plan to get there with laser-like focus and efficiency.
My plans, if you could call them plans, were ever changing. Freshman year I hoped to start a business. Sophomore year I wanted to design electronics. Junior year I wanted to be a derivatives trader. When all was said and done, I left with a professional baseball contract. Doubt accrued as I sensed I was falling behind my peers. Fittingly, the last paper I wrote in college came back with the comment: “You’re understanding of the text is clear, but what do you have to say about it?” I still hadn’t found my voice.
What I think now is incomplete. I look back on passages I wrote in high school and can identify broad generalizations and unnecessary complications. Just the same, I will look back on this sentence and form a different opinion of it. Voice then is dynamic, not constant. We have one, but it will change and so will our opinions.
Effective writing gives readers something to hold onto, to think about, and to consider; it’s training camp for the resolution of our doubts, our silence.