First-person narratives are stories told by a character about their experiences, using “I” and “we” pronouns. They can be unreliable and limited in information. First-person is preferred in some genres, like detective fiction and creative nonfiction. The narrator may be the protagonist or an observer. Unreliable narrators may have a biased perspective, while reliable ones give truthful accounts.
A first-person narrative is a story told by a character about that character’s experiences. This literary point of view, found in both fiction and creative non-fiction, can use both singular and plural pronouns. The narrator might double as the story’s protagonist, but some first-person narrators tell the story from an observer’s point of view. Most first-person narrators have limited information, since they may only know a fraction of the full events unfolding around them, and some are purposely made to appear unreliable.
The narrator of a first person narrative relies on the use of the pronouns “I” and “we”. These two pronouns are known as first person pronouns. Third-person narratives include first-person pronouns, but only in the context of the dialogue – text contained in quotation marks. A narrator in a first-person narrative refers directly to himself, outside the dialogue and within the descriptive portion of the text.
The first-person point of view is used in both fiction and creative non-fiction. For some genres, first person is even considered the preferred narrative perspective. Detective fiction, for example, is often told in first-person narrative form to allow the reader to solve the mystery together with the narrator. A well-known example of this would be Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series, narrated from Dr Watson’s first-person perspective. It is important to note, however, that the author and his first-person narrator are not the same person, and the narrator’s views do not always reflect those of the writer.
Many types of creative nonfiction also work particularly well as first-person narratives. Creative nonfiction essentially refers to stories that depict events that are actually accurate. Memoirs are a type of creative nonfiction describing one or more incidents in the narrator’s life. Because these stories revolve directly around the writer’s life, many are told as first-person narratives. Unlike the narrator of a fictional first-person narrative, the narrator of a non-fictional first-person narrative is usually one and the same with the writer.
While some first-person narrators also serve as the story’s protagonist, others simply act as observers of the story’s events. Within creative nonfiction, first-person narrators who describe a biographical event in someone else’s life tell that story from an outsider’s point of view. In fiction, first-person observational storytellers may act to provide a more objective and reliable narrative, as they are often less affected by the story’s events than the protagonist. Nick Carraway, the narrator of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gats, is a minor character who is able to provide a relatively unbiased perspective since he has little to gain or lose in accurately retelling the events of the story.
When storytellers tell a story and proclaim themselves the main character, however, they are sometimes unreliable. “The Tell-Tale Heart,” by Edgar Allan Poe, is a first-person narrative in which the narrator, who is also the protagonist, has committed a murder. Since he would benefit from the story’s slant, his perspective is largely considered unreliable. However, this is not the same as when a first-person narrator lacks the knowledge to tell an accurate story. No single first-person narrator can have omniscient knowledge of the events of a story, but a reliable narrator gives a truthful account of events as he knows them.
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