First-Person Narrative PDF
First-Person Narrative PDF
First-Person Narrative PDF
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.
1
2 5 REFERENCES
The Sound and the Fury), lie (as in The Quiet American (French) Pierre Deshaies, Le Paysan parvenu
by Graham Greene, or The Book of the New Sun series comme roman la premire personne, [s.l. : s.n.],
by Gene Wolfe), or manipulate his or her own memo- 1975 ;
ries intentionally or not (as in The Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro, or in Ken Kesey's One Flew Over (French) Batrice Didier, La Voix de Marianne. Es-
the Cuckoos Nest). Henry James discusses his concerns sai sur Marivaux, Paris: Corti, 1987, ISBN 2-7143-
about the romantic privilege of the 'rst person'" in his 0229-7 ;
preface to The Ambassadors, calling it the darkest abyss
(French) Philippe Forest, Le Roman, le je, Nantes:
of romance.[1][2]
Pleins feux, 2001, ISBN 2-912567-83-1 ;
One example of a multi-level narrative structure is Joseph
Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness, which has a double R. A. Francis, The Abb Prvosts rst-person nar-
framework: an unidentied I (rst person singular) nar- rators, Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1993, ISBN 0-
rator relates a boating trip during which another charac- 7294-0448-X ;
ter, Marlow, uses rst person to tell a story that comprises
the majority of the work. Within this nested story, it is (French) Jean-Luc Jaccard, Manon Lescaut. Le
mentioned that another character, Kurtz, told Marlow a Personage-romancier, Paris: Nizet, 1975, ISBN 2-
lengthy story; however, its content is not revealed to read- 7078-0450-9 ;
ers. Thus, there is an I narrator introducing a storyteller (French) Annick Jugan, Les Variations du rcit dans
as he (Marlow), who talks about himself as I and in- La Vie de Marianne de Marivaux, Paris: Klinck-
troduces another storyteller as he (Kurtz), who in turn sieck, 1978, ISBN 2-252-02088-1 ;
presumably told his story from the perspective of I.
Marie-Paule Laden, Self-Imitation in the Eighteenth-
Century Novel, Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univer-
4 See also sity Press, 1987, ISBN 0-691-06705-8 ;
(French) Belinda Cannone, Narrations de la vie in- (French) Jean Rousset, Narcisse romancier : essai
trieure, Paris: Klincksieck, 1998, ISBN 2-911285- sur la premire personne dans le roman, Paris: J.
15-8 ; Corti, 1986, ISBN 2-7143-0139-8 ;
(French) Ren Dmoris, Le Roman la premire English Showalter, Jr., The Evolution of the French
personne : du classicisme aux lumires, Paris: A. Novel (16411782), Princeton, N. J. : Princeton
Colin, 1975, ISBN 2-600-00525-0 ; University Press, 1972, ISBN 0-691-06229-3 ;
3
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 ;
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