First Person Narrative: Yes, No or Maybe?

Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, Rebecca and Twilight. Four books written in the First Person and all seem to have done rather well for themselves, even though I gave up on one of them way before the end. 

Oh come on, you already knew the odd one out was Twilight, didn’t you?

This narrative style device virtually guarantees immediacy, taking the reader inside the mind of the lead character, but such intimacy has its pitfalls. The writer has to work hard to avoid the over-use of sentences beginning with ‘I’ while internal monologues and introspective explication are similarly prone to over-use.

My prolific reading addiction, plus extended exposure to fellow writers in my early days as published author exposed faults in my own writing. One of these was a tendency to ‘tell’ rather than ‘show’ and this is even more difficult to eradicate from one’s writing when your leading character can reveal everything they see and feel. What’s the crucial difference, showing or telling? The great Russian man of letters Anton Chekhov said it best, in my view: Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.’

Above all else, with a First Person narrative, there’s the problem of the narrator having to be in every scene – an obvious limitation on plot development.

All this introspection came about a long time ago when I wrote a series of short pieces in my former blog, very loosely based on my own experiences and therefore written in the first person. This worked well, in my somewhat biased opinion, but when considering extending a short vignette into a full novel, i became far from convinced that First Person was the way to go.

I once wrote an entire novel in the First Person only to redraw it later as a more conventional Third Person narrative. The thankless task of editing multiplied tenfold.

When I started thinking aloud at the beginning of this piece, I pulled some examples of books written in this fashion from my imperfect memory. I can now add ‘Engleby’ to the list; a wonderful book that I’d suggest is the definitive example of a novel where a First Person narrative approaches perfection. On the other hand, I’m not Sebastian Faulks so my previous reservations remain in place.