First-person narrative
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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First-person narrative is a literary technique in which the story is narrated by one character, who explicitly refers to him or herself in the first person, that is, using words and phrases involving "I" and "we".
The intensity of such confessional intimacy can be striking. First-person narratives can appear in several forms: interior monologue, as in Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground; dramatic monologue, as in Albert Camus' The Fall; or explicitly, as in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Since the narrator is within the story, he or she may not have knowledge of all the events. For this reason, first-person narrative is often used for detective fiction, so that the reader and narrator uncover the case together.
First-person plural narrators tell the story using "we," that is, no individual speaker is identified; the narrator is a member of a group that acts as a unit. The first-person-plural point of view occurs rarely but can be used effectively, sometimes as a means to increase the concentration on the character or characters the story is about. Examples: William Faulkner in A Rose for Emily (Faulkner was an avid experimenter in using unusual points of view - see his Spotted Horses, told in third person plural), Frederik Pohl in Man Plus, and more recently, Jeffrey Eugenides, in his novel The Virgin Suicides.
First-person narrators can also be multiple, as in Akutagawa's In a Grove (the source for the movie Rashomon) and Faulkner's novel The Sound and the Fury. Each of these sources provides different accounts of the same event.
The first-person narrator may be the principal character or one who closely observes the principal character (see Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights or F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, each narrated by a minor character.). These can be distinguished as "first person major" or "first person minor" points of view.
First-person narrative can tend towards a stream of consciousness, as in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. The whole of the narrative can itself be presented as a false document, such as a diary, in which the narrator makes explicit reference to the fact that he/she is writing or telling a story. In between, narrators may be more or less conscious of themselves as telling a story, and their reasons for telling it and the audience that they believe they are addressing also vary wildly. In extreme cases, a frame story presents the narrator as a character in an outside story who begins to tell his own story.
First person narrators are often unreliable narrators since a narrator might be impaired (as in The Last Film of Emile Vico by Thomas Gavin), lie (as in the The Book of the New Sun series by Gene Wolfe), or manipulate his or her own memories intentionally or not (as in The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro). Henry James discusses his concerns about "the romantic privilege of the 'first person'" in his preface to The Ambassadors, calling it "the darkest abyss of romance."
Perhaps the most convoluted example of a mixed media kind of point of view is Joseph Conrad's novelette Heart of Darkness, which has a double framework: an unidentified narrator describes (in first person plural) Marlow, the protagonist, telling his own story in the first person. Thus we have a "we" describing a "he" who talks about "I".
See also
