First-person narrative

A rst-person narrative is a story from the rst-person William Faulkner's short story "A Rose for Emily"
perspective: the viewpoint of a character writing or (Faulkner was an avid experimenter in using unusual
speaking directly about themselves. In lms, videos, or points of view; see also his Spotted Horses, told in
video games, a rst-person perspective may also mean third person plural).
that the narrative is shot or presented as if directly com-
ing from a characters in-body point of view, portraying Frank B. Gilbreth and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey's
exactly what the character sees or experiences. memoir Cheaper by the Dozen.
The narrators of written works explicitly refer to them-
selves using variations of I (the rst-person singular Theodore Sturgeon's short story Crate.
pronoun) and/or we (the rst-person plural pronoun),
typically as well as other characters. This allows the Frederik Pohl's Man Plus.
reader or audience to see the point of view (including
opinions, thoughts, and feelings) only of the narrator, Jerey Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides.
and no other characters. In some stories, rst-person
narrators may refer to information they have heard from
Karen Joy Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club.
the other characters, in order to try to deliver a larger
point of view. Other stories may switch from one narrator
to another, allowing the reader or audience to experience Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End.
the thoughts and feelings of more than one character or
character plural. First-person narrators can also be multiple, as in
Rynosuke Akutagawa's In a Grove (the source for the
movie Rashomon) and Faulkners novel The Sound and
the Fury. Each of these sources provides dierent ac-
1 Forms counts of the same event, from the point of view of vari-
ous rst-person narrators.
First-person narratives can appear in several forms; inte- The rst-person narrator may be the principal character
rior monologue, as in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from or one who closely observes the principal character (see
Underground; dramatic monologue, also in Albert Ca- Emily Bront's Wuthering Heights or F. Scott Fitzgerald's
mus' The Fall; or explicitly, as Mark Twain's Adventures The Great Gatsby, each narrated by a minor character).
of Huckleberry Finn. These can be distinguished as rst person major or rst
person minor points of view.

2 Point of view device

Since the narrator is within the story, he or she may not
have knowledge of all the events. For this reason, rst-
person narrative is often used for detective ction, so that
the reader and narrator uncover the case together. One
traditional approach in this form of ction is for the main
detectives principal assistant, the Watson, to be the
narrator: this derives from the character of Dr Watson
in Sir Arthur Conan Doyles Sherlock Holmes stories.
In the rst-person-plural point of view, narrators tell the
story using we. That is, no individual speaker is iden-
tied; the narrator is a member of a group that acts as a
unit. The rst-person-plural point of view occurs rarely
but can be used eectively, sometimes as a means to in-
crease the concentration on the character or characters First-person narrators are often unreliable narrators since
the story is about. Examples include:
3 Styles
First-person narratives can tend towards a stream of con-
sciousness and Interior monologue, as in Marcel Proust's
In Search of Lost Time. The whole of the narrative can
itself be presented as a false document, such as a diary,
in which the narrator makes explicit reference to the fact
that he is writing or telling a story. This is the case in
Bram Stoker's Dracula. As a story unfolds, narrators may
be aware that they are telling a story and of their reasons
for telling it. The audience that they believe they are ad-
dressing can vary. In some cases, a frame story presents
the narrator as a character in an outside story who begins
to tell his own story, as in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
a narrator might be impaired (such as Benjy in Faulkners

1
2 5
The Sound and the Fury), lie (as in The Quiet American
by Graham Greene, or The Book of the New Sun series
by Gene Wolfe), or manipulate his or her own memo-
ries intentionally or not (as in The Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro, or in Ken Kesey's One Flew Over
the Cuckoos Nest). Henry James discusses his concerns
about the romantic privilege of the 'rst person'" in his
preface to The Ambassadors, calling it the darkest abyss
of romance.[1][2]
One example of a multi-level narrative structure is Joseph
Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness, which has a double
framework: an unidentied I (rst person singular) nar-
rator relates a boating trip during which another charac-
ter, Marlow, uses rst person to tell a story that comprises
the majority of the work. Within this nested story, it is
mentioned that another character, Kurtz, told Marlow a
lengthy story; however, its content is not revealed to read-
ers. Thus, there is an I narrator introducing a storyteller
as he (Marlow), who talks about himself as I and in-
troduces another storyteller as he (Kurtz), who in turn
presumably told his story from the perspective of I.
4 See also
Narrative mode
Second-person narrative
5 References
Notes
[1] Goetz, William R. (1986). Henry James and the Darkest
Abyss of Romance. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univer-
sity Press. ISBN 0-8071-1259-3.
[2] The Ambassadors (p. 11) on Project Gutenberg Accessed
17 March 2007
Further reading
(French) Franoise Barguillet, Le Roman au XVIIIe
sicle, Paris: PUF Littratures, 1981, ISBN 2-13-
036855-7 ;
(French) mile Benveniste, Problmes de linguis-
tique gnrale, Paris: Gallimard, 1966, ISBN 2-07-
029338-6 ;
(French) Belinda Cannone, Narrations de la vie in-
trieure, Paris: Klincksieck, 1998, ISBN 2-911285-
15-8 ;
(French) Ren Dmoris, Le Roman la premire
personne : du classicisme aux lumires, Paris: A.
Colin, 1975, ISBN 2-600-00525-0 ;
REFERENCES
(French) Pierre Deshaies, Le Paysan parvenu
comme roman la premire personne, [s.l. : s.n.],
1975 ;
(French) Batrice Didier, La Voix de Marianne. Es-
sai sur Marivaux, Paris: Corti, 1987, ISBN 2-7143-
0229-7 ;
(French) Philippe Forest, Le Roman, le je, Nantes:
Pleins feux, 2001, ISBN 2-912567-83-1 ;
R. A. Francis, The Abb Prvosts rst-person nar-
rators, Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1993, ISBN 0-
7294-0448-X ;
(French) Jean-Luc Jaccard, Manon Lescaut. Le
Personage-romancier, Paris: Nizet, 1975, ISBN 2-
7078-0450-9 ;
(French) Annick Jugan, Les Variations du rcit dans
La Vie de Marianne de Marivaux, Paris: Klinck-
sieck, 1978, ISBN 2-252-02088-1 ;
Marie-Paule Laden, Self-Imitation in the Eighteenth-
Century Novel, Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1987, ISBN 0-691-06705-8 ;
(French) Georges May, Le Dilemme du roman au
XVIIIe sicle, 1715-1761, New Haven: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 1963 ;
(French) Ulla Musarra-Schrder, Le Roman-
mmories moderne : pour une typologie du rcit
la premire personne, prcd d'un modle
narratologique et d'une tude du roman-mmoires
traditionnel de Daniel Defoe Gottfried Keller,
Amsterdam: APA, Holland University Press, 1981,
ISBN 90-302-1236-5 ;
(French) Vivienne Mylne, The Eighteenth-Century
French Novel, Techniques of illusion, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1965, ISBN 0-521-
23864-1 ;
(French) Valrie Raoul, Le Journal ctif dans le
roman franais, Paris: Presses universitaires de
France, 1999, ISBN 2-13-049632-6 ;
(French) Michael Riaterre, Essais de stylistique
structurale, Paris: Flammarion, 1992, ISBN 2-08-
210168-1 ;
(French) Jean Rousset, Forme et signication, Paris:
Corti, 1962, ISBN 2-7143-0356-0 ;
(French) Jean Rousset, Narcisse romancier : essai
sur la premire personne dans le roman, Paris: J.
Corti, 1986, ISBN 2-7143-0139-8 ;
English Showalter, Jr., The Evolution of the French
Novel (16411782), Princeton, N. J. : Princeton
University Press, 1972, ISBN 0-691-06229-3 ;
 3

Philip R. Stewart, Imitation and Illusion in the

French Memoir-Novel, 1700-1750. The Art of
Make-Believe, New Haven & London: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 1969, ISBN 0-300-01149-0 ;
(French) Jean Sgard, LAbb Prvost : Labyrinthes
de la mmoire, Paris: PUF, 1986, ISBN 2-13-
039282-2 ;

(French) Loc Thommeret, La Mmoire cratrice.

Essai sur l'criture de soi au XVIIIe sicle, Paris:
L'Harmattan, 2006, ISBN 978-2-296-00826-7 ;
Martin Turnell, The Rise of the French novel, New
York: New Directions, 1978, ISBN 0-241-10181-6
;

Ira O. Wade, The Structure and Form of the French

Enlightenment, Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1977, ISBN 0-691-05256-5 ;

Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, Berkeley & Los An-
geles: University of California Press, 1965, ISBN
0-520-01317-4 ;
Arnold L. Weinstein, Fictions of the self, 1550-1800,
Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1981,
ISBN 0-691-06448-2 ;

(French) Agnes Jane Whiteld, La Problmatique

de la narration dans le roman qubcois la pre-
mire personne depuis 1960, Ottawa: The National
Library of Canada, 1983, ISBN 0-315-08327-1.
4 6 TEXT AND IMAGE SOURCES, CONTRIBUTORS, AND LICENSES

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