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.
Major character tells the story
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.
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.
Third Person
Since a
story is a coherent account of a significant emotional experience the question
naturally arises, whose account is it, or who is telling the story? The writer
may (1) tell the story himself, from his own point of view and on his own
authority, as he sees it. He may tell it (2) as the character sees it. Or (3)
he may tell it through a character in the first person, making a character his
narrator. These are the three main choices before him and the form and content
of the story would depend largely on which method uses
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.
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