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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/29530
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/29530
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

First person limited is not a rule and therefore cannot be violated. It is an analytical category that can be used after the fact to describe what an author has done. The author's responsibility it to tell a compelling story, not to confine that story within an analytical category. If the story is good and the analytical categories do not fit, that it the fault of the analytical system, not the story.

There are all kinds of analytical systems that can be applied to stories. They may or may not be useful in helping you figure out what it wrong with a story that is not working, but you can also find plenty of examples of stories that work just fine that do not fit these categories. But trying to write to these categories is a recipe for a strangled stilted story.

Remember that even if your narrator is a character, they are still a narrator. Nothing binds them to narrate only what their character knows and sees in the moment they are relating it. As a narrator, they are free to know and to express anything that they might have learned later, to interpret how others are feeling or what they are experiencing, to project, to assume, or just plain make stuff up. All of which people do when telling stories about their experiences in the real world.

Now, if you choose to tell a story that is pure stream of consciousness of a single character, that is up to you, but there is no literary requirement to do so. And even our stream of consciousness is not a stream of raw experience but a stream of interpretation, imagination, conjecture, and reflection. We do not merely experience the world, we interpret it, and this includes interpreting what other people are experiencing (a facility without which social life would be impossible).

Making the narrator a character is simply a narrative conceit. The author knows everything and is entitled to tell anything and everything they know by any means they desire, as long as they can make the reader accept it. And the reader will accept almost anything as long as the style of telling stays consistent and there is no obvious laziness or cheating on the author's part.

If the book sells and the analytical categories do not fit, that just demonstrates the limits of that analytical categories.

Original score: 3