Prologue and Epilogue in third person and chapters in first person doable?
My current work is in first person. Well, it's a début so I didn't compare the benefits of first vs. third when I started writing it. I just picked the first because it was easy.
Now the plot line has become layered, and there's multiple storylines running along and there were a lot of scenes which absolutely demanded a switch in pov. That's when I started cussing. I couldn't switch the pov so I hacked my way around those. I think the tweaks came along just fine. And now I'm working on the climax and I don't want to go back and change everything from first to third.
But there's just this one scene which cannot be shown from the protagonist's pov. Just stretching a limb out. I'm planning to put it in the epilogue. It has to be in third person. can I do that? Can I write just that in third person while the rest of the script remains in first person? How about I keep the prologue and epilogue both in third person (just to even out things) and the rest remains in first person? Doable?
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In a sense, this is the whole point to an epilogue --if it had the same feel as the main narrative, it would just be the last chapter. Epilogues exist solely to solve the problem of authors wanting to tell the readers things that don't --for whatever reason --fit into the main framework of the novel (and the same is true for prologues).
That doesn't necessarily mean it's always a good idea. The beloved classic The Secret Garden has an epilogue so universally hated that it's actually omitted in most modern editions of the book.
NOTE: According to the comments below, it's possible that the "epilogue" I remember might actually have been a late addition by another author.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/17779. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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I think everything is doable, if the reader gets the feeling it is fitting. I see no problem in the approach to have the book in first person and switch to third for the finale.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/17777. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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Sounds fine to me. The prologue and epilogue are literally before and after the story, so it's fine for them to be formatted differently or have a different POV.
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