First Person Narration in Books: When Does it Work?
Jane Eyre, claustrophobia, and distance from the narrator
I pay a lot of attention to the mechanics of writing when I read books: is the narration done in first person or third person (or that rare second person)? Is it in past tense or the present tense?1 Why did the author make those choices, and do they enhance the story, or detract from it?
[To hear me rant about how frequently the importance of these choices is neglected, listen to our episode on The Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel]
We talked all about Jane Eyre on the podcast last week, and I became curious about the idea of first person narration. Jane Eyre was one of the first modern novels to be written in the first person — but was it the first ever? And how has Point of View (POV) evolved?
In today’s newsletter I want to talk a bit about POV and how thinking about that choice can impact the way we read books. Then I’ll share some books that I think used first person to excellent effect.
A Brief Introduction to Points of View
POV has to do with the narrator’s relationship to the story. You probably already recognize the differences in POV when you read a book, even if you aren’t thinking about them in a mental schema:2
First Person: this POV reveals a single character’s experience as they tell their story and describe how it feels to them (Eg, Jane Eyre, The Hunger Games)
Second Person: “you” are the main character, and the story is telling the reader who they are and what happens.
Third Person: here it gets a bit tricky because we can branch out into different forms of third person.
Limited third: in this POV, we spend the entire story following just one character, usually with pronouns he/she/they. All the events of the book are filtered through that character’s perceptions. (A good example would be the first few Harry Potter books — we almost never see anything happening without Harry around)
Omniscient third: the best way to picture this POV is that the narrator has all the powers of God, and so is privy to every characters’ movements, thoughts, and emotions.
Of course, there are others I haven’t mentioned here, such as first person plural (“we”) — and authors frequently blend multiple POVs in their books.
POV affects (among other things) the distance between the narrator and the characters, the distance between the reader and the characters, and the distance between the reader and the narrator.
You might think of these three components of reading (the narrator, the character, and the reader) as a triangle — each is linked to the others.3
Taking the example of Jane Eyre, we can see that we are about as close to the narrator (and in this case, the protagonist) as we can get. And I think this is intentional. As we discussed in our podcast discussion, we get so much of Jane’s interiority and emotions that it’s almost impossible to imagine this book written in the third person.
The History of First Person Narration
It’s difficult to find ancient examples of first person POV; internet searches led me to The Golden Ass, which is also the only ancient Roman novel written in Latin to survive in its entirety. It follows a man named Lucius (also the narrator of the story) who has an insatiable desire to practice magic. One day while trying to perform a spell on himself, he transforms into an ass. What follows is a long journey, interspersed with stories and tales, until he is saved by the goddess Isis.
But aside from these sporadic exceptions, for a long time, POV in stories was closest to what we would today call limited third. Because stories were mostly an oral tradition, a bard or other storyteller would describe what he had heard from another storyteller, the same way I might tell my friend about a dramatic event that unfolded at work.
When the novel started to become widespread in the 18th and 19th centuries, whole new narrative techniques opened up, including the ability to weave in and out of people’s minds and explore their thoughts, first seen with free indirect discourse (see: Jane Austen).
I’ll be honest: this is about where I hit my limit. After lots of Googling and browsing Jstor, I couldn’t find any good historical overviews of the emergence of first person narration. I entreat you, readers, to share any materials you have about why and how this POV evolved!
The Benefits and Dangers of First Person Narration
First person narration can create a sense of immediacy and urgency, as well as a deeper exploration of a character’s thoughts and emotions. This can also be a great POV for sinking into a particular voice.
But first person narration is a very claustrophobic place to be: for 300 or more pages, you are stuck inside the head of just one character. It’s very hard to do this well — many authors don’t, and end up using alternating chapters with multiple POVs.4
The claustrophobia is also why first person narration can be so successful for genres like mysteries and thrillers, where the author wants to withhold information from the reader, or with unreliable narrators — because we don’t get anyone else’s perspective in the book, we often have no choice but to believe the narrator.
This review in the Guardian describes some of the perils of first person narration:
Being inside the mind of a character is a thrilling reading experience - and one of the novel's great advantages. But this intimacy comes at a price. The "I" must be compelling at all times. Too many sentences beginning with "I", too many internal monologues and too much introspection - all common characteristics of bad narrators - can kill a reader's interest in ten pages.
Books that use First Person Narration to the Best Effect
Below are some books that I think take full advantage of first person narration — books whose characters, themes, and tones might be completely different if written in a different POV:
Jane Eyre is one of the best books I’ve read in the first person. It has such immediacy, and Jane’s thoughts are so vast and expansive, that I can’t imagine being in anyone else’s head in this story.
By making Nick Carraway our (unreliable?) narrator, Fitzgerald is able to maintain the mystique of Jay Gatsby — he is always somewhat at a distance, and I think we’d read him differently if this book had a different POV.
This book has been criticized for its white savior trope and for how falsely hopeful/cheerful it is about a really horrible time for Black people. I don’t disagree with these criticisms, but I do think that this tone has a lot to do with Scout being the narrator. If the book seems hopeful and simplistic, it is because Scout is a six year old child. I think we’d probably be reading an entirely different book if we had been in Atticus Finch’s head.
This book is difficult to read as it is, but I think it would be almost unreadable in the third person. Part of the brilliance of this book is that you start to feel invested in the life of a horrible person.
The first person narrator in this book is Death — this is not a spoiler. Death’s presence throughout the book and his narration of events cast a dark pall over the story. Without Death as the narrator, I don’t think we’d feel the immediacy and tragedy of the characters’ circumstances.
I’ll refrain from saying too much because this is the next book we’ll be discussing on The Novel Tea podcast! The episode will be out in a few weeks, and we hope you’ll tune in as we uncover the depths of Mrs. de Winter’s thoughts and emotions.
Now we’d love to hear from you: what books do you think use first person narration to the greatest effect?
— Shruti
A whole other topic that I’ll have to save for a future essay!
I’m a reader and a writer but I’m also a surgeon and I think visually — I love a good diagram or chart.
You might also consider this a square with diagonals if you add in the author, assuming they are distinct from the narrator. But this is a distinction that requires more nuance than I can handle in one newsletter.
Which can often be a lazy choice. There are very few books I’ve read where alternating POV chapters in first person feel like they needed to be written in first person — ie, the multiple POV first person should only be used if there is a significant shift in tone, voice, honesty from the character, etc between chapters. If these differences aren’t highlighted, I would argue that the book could just be written in (close) third person.
I was waiting to see Rebecca on the best first-person POV list! Really looking forward to the podcast episode. Also, I love that you're dissecting POV! It used to confuse me so much. Now I think it's such a powerful tool.
Appreciate this look at first person POV! First person can be so good when done well, but I find it incredibly frustrating when it's not. It's one of those things that I tend to either really love or really dislike as a reader.