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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/34339
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/34339
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

First person narratives are not inherently more intimate. You can achieve intimacy or distance in any narrative mode. But in some ways first person can actually diminish intimacy.

But first we have to ask what we mean by intimacy. It could mean any of the following:

- Knowing more about the character, particularly the hidden details of their psyche. If this is what we mean, there are things a third person narrator can tell us about the psyche of a character that the character themselves cannot tell us, since we are not always conscious of the nature of our own psyche.

- Feeling close to the character. First person puts us in the head of the character. But that is not how we get to know people in real life. We get to know people from the outside. All our faculties for getting to know someone, for reading them, for knowing them, are based on seeing them from the outside, and we quickly learn that the thing people say about themselves are often a mask. We trust what our eyes more than our ears when it comes to assessing personality. Third person puts us in a more natural position for getting to know someone.

- Knowing the thoughts and feelings of the person. This might be the best argument for the intimacy of first person. But the third person narrator is at perfect liberty to describe the thought and feelings of the person. And indeed, they can better get at the ambiguity of thoughts and feelings than the character themselves can realistically express. After all, we can only report our own thoughts and feelings to the extent that we understand and can articulate them. But we often fail to understand our thoughts and feelings at the time we experience them, particularly in tense situations.

But we should note that intimacy is not always what you want in a story. In fact, stories are all about distance. They are about maintaining a comfortable distance from dangerous or upsetting events. After all, we read stories about events and adventures that we would never voluntarily be involved in ourselves. We don't watch Sons of Anarchy because we actually want to ride with a drug dealing gun smuggling motorcycle gang. Insofar as we want that experience, we want a buffered version of it, from a physically and morally safe distance.

Narrative technique is all about establishing the right distance from the subject matter, the safe distance that lets us know what we want to know without the pain that would be involved in finding out for ourselves.

And first person can be used as a technique to establish distance. By telling us the story, the involved narrator takes control over what we are allowed to see and hear and know. They decide how intimate their confession is going to be. Sometimes the technique is uses specifically to give us this sense of being pushed back from events, of being kept away from the intimate things, because that resistance to intimacy is what the author seeks to portray.

Also, the first person narrator can be an unreliable narrator, denying intimacy through lies and deception. And in some sense, all involved narrators have to be treated with a little bit of suspicion, because we never wholly trust the stories that other people tell about themselves, knowing, as we do, that we seldom tell the whole truth about ourselves.

So, first person can be used as a distancing technique, and if you want to get as intimate as possible as authentically as possible and as reliably as possible, third person is actually a better instrument for the job.

Original score: 7