Writing a narrator who doesn't know he's the main character
The book is in third-person limited, anchored tight to Jake Reilly's perception. Everything the reader sees, Jake sees. Everything the reader hears, he hears. If Jake doesn't notice it, it isn't on the page.
That is a simple enough rule. The interesting part is what it does to a sentence.
Here's a working example. Somebody walks into a room, and a reader of a more omniscient book would expect a paragraph of description: age, bearing, what they're wearing, what they're carrying, what that all means. In Jake's POV, what you get is roughly what Jake gets:
He was massive. Six-four at least, with hands like dinner plates and shoulders that barely fit through the door. Dark brown skin, close-cropped gray hair, deep-set eyes that swept the room once and understood everything in it. He wore coveralls. The practical kind, stained with grease at the cuffs, worn thin at the knees.
Jake's hands tightened on the wrench. He knew that uniform.
That second paragraph is the POV at work. Most narrators, reaching a man in stained coveralls, would tell you he was a mechanic. Jake doesn't say that. Jake notices what a mechanic would notice, the grease at the cuffs, the wear at the knees, and lets the conclusion land one line later, as recognition rather than analysis. He knew that uniform. The sentence functions as a character trait disguised as a piece of description.
This is the engine the whole book runs on.
What Jake notices: tool wear. Bearing complaint. A door seated two degrees off true. A weld that was done by someone in a hurry. The set of another person's shoulders when they're lying. The pause before a woman answers a question she's already decided not to answer honestly. Whether a house has been lived in or maintained. Whether a field has been plowed by a person or a machine. Whether the person doing the plowing gave a damn.
What Jake doesn't notice: his own effect on the people around him. Almost ever. Consistently. He does not register when he has said the useful thing. He does not register when he has made the woman across from him trust him. Most of all, he does not register when someone loves him. Other characters see it. So does the reader. Jake does not.
That gap, between what the narrator tells you he is seeing and what you, the reader, can see through the same sentence, is where the intimacy of a close-POV novel lives.
If the narrator sees everything, the reader is a passenger. If the narrator sees less than the reader, the reader becomes a witness. You notice the care he is receiving before he does. You feel the affection directed at him before he does. Often you understand the offer somebody is making a full paragraph before he catches up. The reader isn't smarter than the character. Just outside his blind spot, which he cannot help.
The only thing he does not have a blind spot about is machinery. Which is maybe the saddest thing about him.
Writing him taught me two lessons about point of view that I had been using, but not quite understanding, for twenty years.
One. The narrator does not have to be the sharpest person in the book. It is frequently better if he isn't. Attention is not the same as intelligence, and a narrator who pays slightly miscalibrated attention will produce better prose than a narrator who is always right.
Two. What a narrator misses is as much a part of the character as what they notice. A character defined by their blind spots is a character the reader can love. Because loving somebody, I think, is largely the business of noticing what they do not.
Jake Reilly doesn't know he's the protagonist of this novel. He thinks he's a guy who got swept up in something and is doing what he can. The reader, by the end, knows what he isn't letting himself see.
That is more or less the whole book.
