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First Person
When the narrator is a character in the story, it is a self-contained unit, a whole within itself, and the reader's attention is not diverted constantly from a narrator outside the story to people within it, and back again. first person makes for economy of attention and for a more unified coherent structure compared to the omniscient method. When the narrator is himself a character, that by itself gives us a certain unity of character; when he is a concrete personality and not some nameless or nebulous storyteller, a new dramatic element is added to the story by dramatizing the narrator. First person automatically changes author words to character words. The progression from author to character is complete.
A story becomes a meaningful picture of life when a particular aspect of it is selected for emphasis; it is what the writer emphasizes that makes the story; point of view is important in the strategy of reader attention.
If the writer is not sure who story he is telling the reader will be searching for the character on whom to pin his attention, and flounder along with the writer....
Robinson Crusoe ... because Crusoe himself tells it,. it all seems true.
Henry James tells the ghost story in the Turn of the Screw in first person, narrated by the young governess who saw the ghosts...
The first person nears the so-called confession magazines precisely those elements they need - immediacy and intensity of emotion, an intimate tone of narration, credibility, heated prose, reader identification....
First person tends to summary. Like author -I, character-I is a "telling" method, and the voice of the narrator may absorb into other voices. In Samuel Becket's Molloy, for instance, there are no quotation marks and the story is told in one voice, that of Malloy himself. There are a few paragraph divisions and it is one long monologue.
Example from:
(First person point of view, used to characterize the narrator; establishes the narrator's existential suffering.)
I paid, Madeline took away my saucer. My glass crushes a puddle of yellow beer against the marble tabletop, a bubble floating in it. The bottom of my seat is broken and in order not to slide, I am compelled to press my heels firmly against the ground; it is cold. On the right, there playing cards on a woollen cloth. I do not see them when I came in: I simply felt there was a warm packet, half on the seat, half on the table in the back, with pairs of waving arms. Afterwards, Madeline brought them cards, the cloth and chips in a wooden bowl. There are three or five of them. I don't know. I have the courage to look at them. I have a broken spring: I can move my eyes but not my head. The head is all pliable and elastic, as though it had been simply set on my neck; if I turn it, it will fall off. All the same, I hear a short breath and from time to time, out of the corner of my eye I see reddish flash covered with her. It is a hand.
When the patronne goes shopping her cousin replaces her at the bar. His name is Adolphe. I began looking at him as I sat down and have kept on because I cannot turn my head. He is in shirtsleeves, with purple suspenders; he has rolled the sleeves of his shirt above the elbows. The suspenders can hardly be seen against the blue shirt, they're all obliterated, buried in the blue, but it is false humility; in fact, they will not let themselves be forgotten, they annoy me by their sheep-like stubbornness, as if, starting to become purple, they stopped somewhere along the way without giving up their pretensions. You feel like saying, "All right, become purple and let's hear no more about it." But now they say stay in suspense, stubborn in their defeat. Sometimes the blue which surrounds them slips over and covers them completely; I stay an instant without seeing them. But it is merely a passing wave, soon the blue pales in places and I see the small island of hesitant purple reappear, grow larger, rejoining reconstitute the suspenders. Cousin Adolphe has no eyes: his swollen, retracted eyelids open only on a little of the whites. He smiles sleepily; from time to time he snorts, yelps and writhes feebly, like a dreaming dog.
Example from:
(First person point of view, used to tell "my story.")
But all this does not come into my story. Only the real Venice is concerned, the city of palaces, of adventures, of masques and pale nights on the lagoon, which carry like no other nights the sound of clandestine romances. In the bit of Venice of which I shall tell, there are only poor ordinary sounds, the days passed monotonously over it, as though they were but a single day, and the songs one hears there are swelling plaints that do not mount upward but settle like curling smoke over the alleys. As soon as twilight comes, much furtive humanity mills around the streets, countless children have their homes upon the squares and in the narrow cold doorways and play with chips and leavings of varicolored glass flux, the same from which the Masters pieced together at the stern mosaics of San Marco.
Example from
David Malouf
(First person point of view, used to describe in a very personal, poetic point of view)
Slowly they came to a halt.
Stood.
Breathing.
There was a silence, vast as the plain, and I heard my own heart beats, like the faintest echo of their hooves, and my own breathing like theirs, only closer, tearing at my chest. And one of those creatures, out of the shadowy forces that blocked out the whole horizon above me, came slowly, putting its hooves down gently in the dust, towards me, and halted just a foot away, so that I felt its breath, its warmth, and thought I heard on the flow of its breath a sound whose syllables I could interpret. Once again, it was the tune that I recognized, as if, having no language of my own now, I had begun to listen for another meaning.
I put out my hand, touched it..
Example from:
Joseph Conrad
(First person point of view - but omniscient sounding - used to tell a story.)
In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnish sprits. A haze rested on low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.
The Director of Companies was our Captain and our host. We four affectionately watched his back as he stood in the bows looking to seaward. On the whole river there was nothing that looked half so nautical. He resembled a pilot, which to a seaman is trustworthiness personified.
The choice of a narrator may well be a crucial one. If the reader gets the writer's version of the event, the account is given by someone outside the action. The writer is not in the story, and he is not writing about himself. If the reader gets a character's version of the same event, the account is given by someone in the story, by one of the actors in the action, perhaps by the leading actor himself.
One advantage the writer has over any character as narrator is that he can be omniscient in the story. He can tell what a character is thinking, know his past and future, his innermost secrets. A character cannot enter the minds of other characters, he can tell us only his own thoughts, describe only his own feelings. The character narrator is an observer in relation to other people, as we are all in real life. He sees them from the outside only.
Omniscience, alas, is only a literary convention.
Example from:
Orson Scott Card
(Third person omniscient point of view, used to describe and set the scene and to introduce characters)
His voice was tense and harsh-sounding as he strained to be heard across the broad expanse between him and the farthest camels, where Vas had been helping Sevet to mount....
At first Luet feared that Elemak would interpret Eiadh's pleading for Nafai's life as yet another proof that his wife loved Nafai more than him. But no. Her pleading was that he must save his own life by not harming Nafai. Therefore he could only take it as proof that she loved him for it was his life she was trying to save.
Vas had also come back to Elemak, and now laid a hand on his other shoulder.
Then why not tell the story from the writer's point of view? Why speak through a character? Could we have a better narrator than the author himself? Why not make it frankly an author's report?
Many of the world's great novels are written using the omniscient method. We see the action through the author's eyes and we hear his voice, except when, as in a scene, we hear also character voices. But do we really want to be told stories by somebody who was not there, who is making it up perhaps, just to entertain us? Do we want to get an author's report of what happened, which granted, might be highly interesting and charming - or would we rather see the event for ourselves, or hear it from somebody who was there, to whom it all happened, or who saw it with his own eyes?...
There are two kinds of author's reports: personal and impersonal or subjective and objective. The writer who uses the personal method does not efface himself were take himself out of the story. He expresses his own opinions and feelings about the event in the people in it. In Fielding, he is frankly Fielding or some unnamed narrator whom we may take to be Fielding, or his alter-ego. The writer steps boldly into the story and does not hide his presence; although he is not one of the dramatis personae, he almost always becomes one when he takes an active part as Fielding does in Tom Jones and Thackeray does in Vanity Fair. While we're getting acquainted with the characters, we're getting acute acquainted also with the author narrator and, by the time we finish the story, we have a definite mental image of him also. He can be a "character." We can identify ourselves with Fielding more readily than with Tom Jones or Sophia Western.
The personal author feels free to comment on the action and to speak to the reader in his own person as author-I. His commentary, though no part of the action, may elucidate the events and the people, enhancing the value and interest of the story, but no matter how eloquent or persuasive it is after all no part of the original event but something added by the writer. It may even be a distraction or nuisance....
Example from:
Denis Johnson
(Third person, used to describe a scene)
Beggars moved along the road ahead of him toward the lowering dusk, people without arms, gangs of pin heads led by their insensate cousins, twisted-up people, the sightless and deaf, and creatures obliged to cover up their faces with rotting burlap, or muslin gone grey, so that nobody would have to see what terrifying portraits the genes could paint. Only the legless immobile ones were put up with in town; all the others had to live in the countryside. He felt like one of them, bent toward the earth and forced by an invisible deformity to walk sideways.
Fiskadoro stumbled suddenly on the road. He went over and lay down under a tree and slept.
Flaubert disliked the personal tone, the editorializing author with his subjective approach to his characters, and eliminated all condemnation or approval, and all references to himself in Madam Bovary. There are no little essays by Flaubert in which he reflects upon his action or actors, the treatment of the subject is cool, aloof, noncommital. Flabert does not come out openly in favor of any person in the book, nor does he take a reader into his confidence and chat with him. He is under no obligation to win the good opinion of the reader, to be amusing or witty or moralistic. Madame Bovary is the first modern novel and still a model objectivity.
But complete objectivity of course is a delusion; no writer can be neutral unless he is a hopeless cynic. Flaubert is not neutral. Ecology is a relative term infection. We know what Flaubert thinks of his characters from his ironic and satirical tone. There's not a single sympathetic for trail of a major character in the whole book.
When the writer's vision is narrowed to a character's there is a further restriction in omniscience. The viewpoint is the character's but he is not the narrator; if he were, the story would be written in first person. This method is like writing a first-person story in third person, changing "I" to "he" or "she," and the point of view is half external, half internal, with author as narrator and character as seer. When skillfully used, it may combine the best features of both the external and internal points of view.
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