![]() ![]() ‘Just an hour ago I felt great, now I want nothing more than the half bottle of whisky I keep in my desk drawer.’ Consider how the following first and third person pieces of narration give the exact same information: It may seem undeniable that the first person offers a more direct route to emotional expression but often the reverse is true. When approaching a character’s thoughts and feelings, third person is just as able to both show and tell the reader how a character is feeling. Show, don’t tellįirst person narration is often seen as the only way to get inside a character’s head, but that simply isn’t true. Information can still be withheld, the story is free to twist as much as it wants, but the author will never be hamstrung while trying to impart information a first person narrator wouldn’t know or can’t believably communicate. In contrast the third person offers a reliable narrator who can address the reader as a reader without harming their suspension of disbelief. This is most commonly seen in stories set in alternate worlds, where the first person narrator is forced to provide the reader with exposition that no authentic citizen of such a world would ever consider. When used correctly a limiting narrator can enhance the reading experience, but it’s also possible to write yourself into a corner. In Wuthering Heights the reader experiences events from the point of view of various characters, their obvious biases and limited information shaping how the story is understood.īooks such as Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi have used the unreliable narrator to great effect, and if you’re looking to trick your reader one of the surest ways to do it is only allow them to experience the world through the eyes of an unreliable character. The unreliable narrator is a famous literary tool most commonly linked with first person narration. One big consideration is how much you want the reader’s understanding constrained by the character’s personality. The choice isn’t as simple as saying ‘I want to focus on one character, so I should write in the first person’, because the third person may still be the best point of view for that story. The third person point of view can go anywhere at any time or, crucially, stick with a single character just as the story would in first person. Not because of the information the reader is being asked to keep separate, but because the different voices telling the story become either too eclectic to be immersive or too similar to be believable. The maximum number of voices a reader can comfortably accommodate in this manner is usually around three, with some variation depending on author skill.īeyond that it gets confusing. ![]() In the third person this is easily done, you simply tell the reader they are now observing someone else, but in the first person it’s far more difficult.Įach character used to tell a first person story to a reader requires their realistic internal voice. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire is written from the third person point of view, and takes advantage of the freedom it offers to centre different chapters on different characters. While this is only partly true, the freedom to roam is certainly an advantage of the third person point of view. Received wisdom states that writing in the first person is the best way to establish a deep and intimate understanding of a single character, whereas the third person offers the author more freedom to tell a story. In this article, I’ll be exploring the advantages third person narration offers authors, as well as some drawbacks and how they can be overcome. It’s no surprise then that the vast majority of stories are told in the third person. The third person perspective, abandoning ‘I’ in favor of ‘him, her, it and them’, is the natural writing style for telling stories about other people. ![]() As an Amazon Affiliate we earn from qualifying purchases. This article may contain affiliate links and we may earn a small commission when you click on the links at no additional cost to you.
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