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Q&A First or third person

First person narration is a gross violation of common sense. I say this simply to point out that all forms of narrative, or almost all, are a gross violation of common sense. Who is telling this st...

posted 4y ago by Mark Baker‭

Answer
#1: Initial revision by user avatar Mark Baker‭ · 2020-02-08T13:15:03Z (about 4 years ago)
First person narration is a gross violation of common sense. I say this simply to point out that all forms of narrative, or almost all, are a gross violation of common sense. Who is telling this story and when? Who observed that action that is being told, and how? How did it get into the hands of the reader?

There are a couple of narrative forms that avoid this problem. One is what I call first person reflective, where the narrator explicitly states that they are writing down (usually in old age) something that happened to them in the past (usually their youth). Another is the epistolary novel (putting aside the question of how the letters were collected and published).

But in most novels, the narrator is a construct whose existence, method of observation, and method of storytelling are never justified. And the worst offender (if this is to be considered an offence) is what I call first person immediate (meaning that the narrator is the character and they are narrating things more or less as they happen). Who exactly is the character talking to? When exactly are they writing this down? How, exactly, does it get into the hands of the reader? 

In your last survivor example, all these questions occur in spades. Who could they possibly be talking to? How, exactly, does it get into the hands of the reader, given that everyone else is dead?

The solution to all this, of course, is that this is a story, the reader knows it is a story, and stories need to be told. They need a narrator. They need a narrative voice. And they need a narrative point of view. That is simply the nature of the art, and all who consume the art (one hopes) understand this, if only tacitly. 

So by all means write in third person, which is to say, write in the voice of the storyteller. This is the universal default of the storytelling art. You should only deviate from it for a good and specific aesthetic reason. 

The excuse commonly given for the use of first person (that is, the use of an involved narrator) is that it bring the reader close to the character. This is nonsense. For one thing, this is not how we get close to people in real life. We don't become them. We get close to them while remaining separate from them. Second, the third person narrator can go everywhere the first person narrator can go, can reveal every thought and feeling, can tell us each and every thing the first person narrator can. 

The real literary property of a first person narrator is that they can be (and usually are) unreliable. People fool themselves, and the often try to fool other people. We seldom tell people how we really feel or what we are really thinking. A first person narrator who reveals everything about themselves honestly is behaving is a very inhuman fashion. 

When we observe a first person narrator, therefore, we are (presumptively) observing someone who is hiding something from us, who is presenting a false face, since this is what every human we ever encounter is doing. And that can be a brilliant effect for a writer to exploit in telling a story. But the last thing it does is bring us closer to the character. On the contrary, it reveals the character through what they attempt to hide from us, from how they push us away. 

This can be a brilliant effect if done well, but it is very difficult to pull off. But it is, to my mind, the only justification for the use of first person immediate. If you just want to tell a story, the voice of the storyteller (third person) is the natural form for that purpose.