Relationships & Partners and Writing Skills Tips. (A Writing Advice Guide Book

Lectures 16: I, Me & Mine First PersonPoint of View

Lectures 16: I, Me & Mine First Point of View

The inherent improbability of first person narratiom, was summed up by Henry James in the preface of his novels, when he remarked how strange it was to make a first-person both "hero and historian of his own story. In other words, first person narration can be peculiar because it often (though not always)  must acomplish two goals at once: tell the story and evoke one of the story's characters, often the most important character: But it's also true that first-person narration can be one of the most intimate, seductive, and natural-seeming ways to tell a story.

Objective First Person
The objective first-person narrator is present in the story but is not the most important character. This kind of narration is halfway between the close third person and a more intimate first person.
One of the most obvious examples of objective first-person narration is Ishmael in Moby-Dick. Ishmael, of course, introduces himself in the first line of the novel, and for much of the book, we hear a great deal about his experiences. But the book is more about Captain Ahab than it is about anyone else, and indeed, Ahab and many of the other characters are more interesting than Ishmael. Further, Ismael doesn't develop in the way that characters in modern novels often do.
In The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway takes much more of a role in the story than Ishmael does, but on the whole, he serves mainly as a recording eye. He is also an outsider to the world he depicts; thus, he's able to record the story of the wealthy characters around him with more objectivity and distance than Gatsby or Daisy could.
The slightly remote first person narration allows readers to feel that they are witnessing the events of the novel at firsthand but with no pressure to endorse a particular opinion of any of the characters or actions in the story.

The Heroic Narrator
The heroic narrator is usually the main character or one of the main characters and takes an active role in the events of the story. In this case, the narration's evocation of character is equally important to telling the story.

Both objective first-person and heroic narration invite readers to take the narrator at face value and assume that he or she is telling the truth. But heroic narration also invites readers to actively endorse the narrator's judgments of the other characters and situations in the story.

We don't root for Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby because he's not the main character, and Nick's slight remove from the action enables us to make up our own minds about Gatsby. But in Jane Eyre, we are not only asked to assume that Jane is telling the truth throughout, but we are also actively encouraged to endorse Jane's judgments of the other characters and to root for things to turn out well for her.

With a heroic narrator, there is not much difference between the narrator's opinion of the other characters and the author's. Consider Philip Marlowe, the hard-boiled private investigator who is the main character and narrator of the detective stories of Raymond Chandler.

At first glance, it might seem as If Marlowe is just a recording-eye narrator, but if we listen to his voice carefully, we realize that he is passing judgment on a world that doesn't share his strict sense of morality.

The distance between the author's view of the world and that of the heroic narrator, such as Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, is not very great, allowing both the author and the reader to live through the narrator.

A more complex version of the heroic narrator is Huck Finn, a classic example of the double consciousness of a first-person narrator.
The distance between the author's view of the world and that of the heroic narrator, such as Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, is not very great, allowing both the author and the reader to live through the narrator.
With this technique, a skilled writer can simultaneously evoke the beliefs and prejudices of his narrator while letting the reader see through the narration to what's really going on.