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

Lectures 16: I, Me & Mine First PersonPoint of View P2

The Retrospective Narrator
With retrospective narration, the narrator recalls events from a distance of many years, looking back on a time when he or she was younger.

this type of ahartion, the a younger person and the character at the tice between the cha. Many stories and bookson fil the character at the time of the narration. Many stories and books fulfll the first requirement here but not the second.

Jane Eyre, for example, looks back on her struggles as a young woman from the perspective of an older woman, fulfilling the first requirement. But Jane doesn't write very citical to obe tively about herself as a younger woman we're encouraged to root for her throughout the book; thus, her narration doesn't fulfill the second requirement.

One of the best examples of the sort of narrator who fulfills both requirements is Ruth in Marilynne Robinson's novel Housekeeping. Much of this book is about how Ruth and her sister, Lucille, two young girls who have either been abandoned or orphaned by all the other adults in their family, end up being looked after by their unconventional aunt, Sylvia.

Sylvia makes an attempt to create some stability for her nieces in the family home in Idaho, but she can't resist the pull of a restless life, and in the end, the young Ruth chooses to run off with her aunt while Lucille chooses to stay behind and live a more conventional life. The story is told many years later by the grown-up Ruth, who is now a vastly different person from the young girl she had been.

Ruth looks back on her childhood without regret or nostalgia but, instead, with a kind of bemused, mysterious calm that passes no judgment and does not require the reader to make a judgment either.

Written in limpid, poetic prose, Ruth's narration takes readers on a spiritual journey that requires us to reconsider everything we may have thought was true about family life, motherhood, and the relations between sisters. Ruth's voice puts us in the mind of an unusual character and shows us the world in a whole new light.

There are also retrospective first- person earn contemp look back on the Formerse ades with disappointment ovari Room. , do ve san vin powd in James Baldwin's novel Giovare as expe. indeed, we might say that David is an antiheroic narrator udement of him to take Davidis story at face value and to endorse his judgmen for himself though in this case, we are meant to share his contempt for himself, rather than endorse his heroism.

The Unreliable Narrator
The unreliable narrator is one who cannot be trusted by the reader. The simplest version of this narrator simply lies to the reader, revealing his or her deceit at the end of the story. In John Banville's novel Doctor Copernicus, there's a section written in the first person by a scholar named Rheticus, who was Copernicus's student but is angry with his teacher. His chapter is full of gossip and criticisms of Copernicus, and only at the end does he confess that a crucial element in his story was invented, casting doubt on nearly everything he has said.

There are also unreliable narrators who lie to the other characters in the story and often end up deluding themselves. As we saw earlier, the unnamed first-person narrator of Henry James's novella The Aspern Papers is a literary critic who is desperate to acquire some old love letters by a long-dead American poet. Throughout the novella, the narrator wrestles with his conscience over what he has done to get the letters, but in the end, he stifles his guilt.

Another sort of unreliable narrator deludes both himself or herself and the reader. The experience of reading Eudora Welty's story "Why I Live at the P.O." is like being cornered by a talkative and slightly unhinged woman who believes she has been wronged by her family. Because of the narrator's self-pity and her unconscious comic exaggeration, it's clear that her version of events is extremely biased, if not untrue. But unlike Rheticus, who ultimately admits that he has lied to the reader, Welty's narrator sticks to her guns.

Finally another variation on the unreliable narrator is the narrator who may or may not be unreliable, but whose truthfulness is never revealed to the reader.

One of the most interesting recent examples of such a narrator is in Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist. The novel is narrated in the first person by a Pakistani man who has attended Princeton and worked on Wall Street, but who, after the events of 9/11, has found himself in reluctant sympathy with the goals of the terrorists.

The novel is framed as a long monologue, in which the unnamed narrator tells his life story to an American listener. What makes this narration so unusual is that there are increasing hints that the narrator may be a terrorist and that his listener may be an American intelligence agent sent to kill him. The potential unreliability of the narrator is essential to the final impact of this unsettling and thought-provoking book. -James Hynes

Fight Club movie is told by an unreliable narrator-Lumna10. Brandon McCulty got this one right on his channel on Youtube.

Writing Prompt
Try your hand at either the double consciousness that Twain uses in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or the unreliable narrator technique used by Burdora Welty or Mohsin Hamid. In the first instance, pick : character whose worldview you disagree with and write in his or he voice, trying to let your own worldview peek through. In the second instance, write from the point of view of a character who is clearly lying about something; try to stay true to the voice while letting the read know that everything the narrator says is not necessarily true.

Enjoy!