More First Lines
This is a thing that we did once to accompany that article we wrote that one time and it was really nifty, so why not do it again? Exactly. So here are some first lines (often more than just the very first one) that blow us away.
1. If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade.
So you might think that this is the beginning of a preface or something, but no, that’s how the book starts. Something like that is just so wild that you have to keep going. It eases you in and talks to you about you reading a story. It addresses your actual reading experience. You want to know when the narrator is going to knock this off and when the story is going to begin, but you’re forced to pay attention to the fact that you are reading a few opening statements. Soon enough, however, nothing else seems nearly as important as starting Italo Calvino’s new novel. It achieves the desired effect.
2. “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” by Raymond Carver
My friend Mel McGinnis was talking. Mel McGinnis is a cardiologist, and sometimes that gives him the right. The four of us were sitting around his kitchen table drinking gin.
We get a couple of impressions right away: the narrator is sarcastic and cynical, based on the comment about cardiology, and that Mel is probably full of it, if being a cardiologist makes him think so much of himself, especially if he’s been drinking. Despite this, Mel is still the narrator’s friend. Carver’s done a lot of characterization and scene-setting in these three sentences without actually talking about much. All we really know for sure is that Mel is a cardiologist and there are four people drinking and Mel is talking, but these lines give you so much more than that.
3. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow that was coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.
What. That doesn’t make any sense. At all. How could this book that serious people read possibly be about a moocow? And what in the name of Dedalus do tuckoo and nicens mean? Something very strange is going on here. This sentence reads like a poorly written kid’s book. The words repeat, the subject matter is childish, and it begins with the quintessential children’s book opening, “Once Upon a Time”. Portrait is a book about growing up, and it begins in the main character’s earliest days. There is then no better way to begin than with an opening that sounds like a child’s stream of consciousness.
4. “After the Stations of the Cross” by Peter Tysver
I was the definition of toast in the aisle with all the cereals and I had my fixing goggles on the sweet ones when I heard some dude go, Robbie. This is my name, so I of course checked it out, but all that was there was this one dude stamping price tags on boxes of Cheerios, so I was ready to just bag it and think it was just my brutal toastedness…
This one doesn’t make much sense either. There are a lot of words that are out of context (“toast,” “fixing goggles,” “bag,”) that suggest a very specific slang with which the reader probably unfamiliar. The lack of quotation marks when the dude goes Robbie shows some extreme casualness and only adds to the confusion. The joy in reading this section is figuring out what’s actually going on and getting into Robbie’s narration, which is in a pretty remarkable voice. And of course, you want to know what “brutal toastedness” is. That’s just a given.
SUBMIT A FIRST LINE AND YOUR COMMENTARY ON IT HERE! We would like to include your favorite first lines in these segments as well. We also accept first lines from your work, so don’t be shy!
- O
First Lines
NOTE: We’re doing first and second sentences if we can manage it. We want you to see the flow from the first to the second (and sometimes the third and fourth).
1. Light in August by William Faulkner
Sitting beside the road, watching the wagon mount the hill toward her, Lena thinks, ‘I have come to Alabama: a fur piece. All the way from Alabama a-walking. A fur piece.’ Thinking although I have not been quite a month on the road I am already in Mississippi, further from home than I have ever been before. I am now further from Doane’s Mill than I have been since I was twelve years old
This beginning is so good I that I can’t even type just the first and second sentences. It may seem commonplace, boring even, but that’s the brilliance of Faulkner. His sentences blend into each other so fully that it is difficult even to find a place to stop. That metaphor of the sentences as cars on a train is never more apt than in a novel by Faulkner.
2. America (The Book) by John Stewart, Ben Karlin, David Javerbaum, Rich Blomquist, Steve Bodow, Tim Carvell, Eric Drysdale, J.R. Havlan, Scott Jacobson, Tom Johnson, Rom Kutner, Chris Regan, Jason Reich, and Jason Ross
It is often said that America “invented” democracy. This view is, of course, an understatement; America invented not only democracy, but freedom, justice, liberty, and “time-sharing”.
The first sentence is so ridiculous that you read on. The second sentence is even more ridiculous, so you continue hoping that things will eventually be explained. If you have read America (The Book), you know how disappointed that little ray of hope will be. This book is farcical nonfiction, and the first couple of sentences reflect that, setting the tone for the entire mock-textbook.
3. When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris
My friend Patsy was telling me a story. “So I’m at the movie theatre,” she said, “and I’ve got my coat all neatly laid out against the back of my seat, when this guy comes along—” And here I stopped her, because I’ve always wondered about this coat business.”
With the very first line, we feel like the narrator is speaking to us, catching us up on the story now in progress. And he doesn’t relent, either. Sedaris dives right into stream of consciousness dialogue then, very abruptly (as one would in a real-time conversation) he cuts the woman, Patsy, off to wonder about this coat business. Now we’re wondering about this coat business. What coat business? And so it goes.
4. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once.
Oh boy. So what we’ve got here is a pretty short first sentence with not much information. The fact that we’ve literally only been told about a green hunting cap that is too small for someone’s big head is kind of irritating, which is sort of the perfect tone to set for this book: prepare to be annoyed. The first sentence thuds into the second like an hammer into a watermelon; it’s got the repetition of “green”, the continued (pointed and detailed) description of the head we learned about at the end of the first sentence, and an absolutely ridiculous simile. If you don’t want to scratch your eyes out with a fork by the second sentence, you’re probably the kind of person who would love this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.
5. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold. My fingers stretch out, seeking Prim’s warmth but finding only the rough canvas cover of the mattress. She must have had bad dreams and climbed in with our mother. Of course, she did. This is the day of the reaping.
Collins has begun quite intimately. We are in the narrator’s bed, which is made even more personal by the fact that the story is told in first person present. The first character name we read is Prim, who is not the main character, but is obviously important to him or her. We learn about another character, their mother, while also making inferences about the socioeconomic state of the characters so far — rough canvas covering the mattress and the fact that these two people are sleeping in the same bed may imply that the characters are poor. We also wonder with the narrator about Prim’s bad dreams, and are left with a big question: What is the reaping?
SUBMIT A FIRST LINE AND YOUR COMMENTARY ON IT HERE! We would like to include your favorite first lines in these segments as well. We also accept first lines from your work, so don’t be shy!
“Unlike Newton's mechanics, or Maxwell's electrodynamics, or Einstein's relativity, quantum theory was not created - or even definitively packaged - by one individual, and it retains to this day some of the scars of its exhilarating but traumatic youth. There is no general consensus as to what its fundamental principles are, how it should be taught, or what it really "means." Every competent physicist can "do" quantum mechanics, but the stories we tell ourselves about what we are doing are as various as the tales of Scheherazade, and almost as implausible. Richard Feynman (one of its greatest practitioners) remarked, "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.”
—David Griffiths, 1995 Preface to Introduction to Quantum Mechanics
“The summer following the winter that my mother took off into something called Women's Land for what I could only guess would be all eternity, my father decided that there was no choice but for him to quit his despised job and take me and my brother to the beach for at least the entire summer and possibly longer.”
—Bennett Madison’s The September Girls declared The Best First Sentence Of A Novel This Year (So Far!) | The Awl
Great First Lines YA Book Display
yalsa.ala.orgA post from the YALSA blog with the great idea of creating a library display around some of the most memorable first lines from YA literature. (Just reading through the list of first lines is pretty awesome in itself.)
