Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Post History

50%
+0 −0
Q&A Is the MC in first person singular always all knowing?

TL;DR: First-person protagonists are never all-knowing, but if they're telling the story after the fact, they can know things they haven't been told yet. First-person narratives come in two flavou...

posted 5y ago by F1Krazy‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by System‭

Answer
#4: Attribution notice removed by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-12T21:42:33Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/47089
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T12:37:25Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/47089
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision by (deleted user) · 2019-12-08T12:37:25Z (almost 5 years ago)
TL;DR: **First-person protagonists are never all-knowing, but if they're telling the story after the fact, they _can_ know things they haven't been told yet.**

First-person narratives come in two flavours: past-tense, where the narrator is recalling events that have already happened; and present-tense, where the narrator is describing events as they happen. Past tense is more common in novels, and present tense is more common in visual novels.

In a present-tense first-person narrative, the narrator cannot possibly be all-knowing. They learn things at the exact same time as the reader - or possibly even _afterwards_, depending on the reader's level of perception or genre-savviness.

In a past-tense first-person narrative, the narrator has the benefit of hindsight, and will know things they shouldn't know at that point in the narrative. _To Kill a Mockingbird_, for example, opens with Scout and Jem arguing over the exact chain of events that led to Jem breaking his arm, something that doesn't happen until the very end of the book. But the narrator's knowledge is still limited to their own experiences, and anything they may have been told after the fact, so they're still not omniscient like a third-person narrator can be.

* * *

To address the question you edited in while I was writing this:

If you're using a past-tense narrative, you can have the narrator explain what happened during their absences, under the pretence that they were told later. If you're using a present-tense narrative, and nobody ever fills the narrator in _during_ that narrative, then they cannot possibly know what happened during their absence and you **cannot** have them describe it to the reader.

#1: Imported from external source by user avatar System‭ · 2019-08-03T14:57:27Z (over 5 years ago)
Original score: 6