Jonathan Franzen’s favourite opening line to a novel: “The very first impulse of the narrator”
While speaking about his favourite passages in literature to The Atlantic, Stephen King sparked an idea for journalist Joe Fassler. “You could go around and ask people about their favourite first lines,” King suggested. “I think you’ll find that most of them, right away, establish the sense of voice we talked about. Why not do it? I’d love to know, like, Jonathan Franzen’s favourite first line.”
The first line of a piece of literature has the same effect as judging a book by its cover: if it doesn’t grip you at first glance, it may be better left on the shelf for someone else to find. An opening sentence is a writer’s sole chance to latch onto the reader’s subconscious, sparking an inkling of desire to continue reading.
King surely knows a thing or two about the power these words hold. “Jack Torrance thought: Officious little prick,” opens The Shining, allowing us into the polarizing main character’s mind. King sets the scene for his petrifying clown thriller IT with an evocative description: “The terror, which would not end for another 28 years, if it ever did end, began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.”
Franzen has an impressive range of opening lines to his own credit. His most well-known novel, The Corrections, begins with a compelling image: “The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through” (Followed by the equally thrilling line, “You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen”).
What is Jonathan Franzen’s favourite opening line?
Alongside fellow esteemed writers including Margaret Atwood, Roxane Gay, Justin Torres and Lydia Davis, Fassler prompted Franzen to choose his most favourite opening line. He named the beginning of Franz Kafka’s The Trial. Published posthumously in 1925, Kafka’s novel became one of his best-known. Franzen translated the opening line himself: “Someone must have slandered Josef K, because one morning, without his having done anything bad, he was arrested.”
“The method of the whole novel is here in a nutshell,” Franzen explains of his choice. “You think you’re being introduced to the persecution of an innocent man, but if you read the chapter that follows carefully, you see that Josef K is in fact doing all sorts of bad things in his life.”
While neither the reader nor Josef K himself is made aware of the nature of his crime in question, the former is caught in a spiral of ill decision-making, leading towards his unfortunate fate. Franzen expanded on the importance of the first line, stating, “If you then go back and reread the first sentence, it becomes significant that the very first impulse of the narrator (who is aligned with Josef K’s point of view) is to blame somebody else.” Though we are left in the dark in regard to the context of The Trial, Kafka utilises his opening line to tell his reader all they need to know.
Kafka’s often surrealist approach to fiction is sure to draw any reader into its grasp. Knowing that Franzen holds his writing in such high regard is a testament to literature’s perseverance.
