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Old 04-17-2020, 07:29 PM   #3809
Rev. Bob
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Quote:
Originally Posted by hobnail View Post
I was once thinking about the first person narrative and was thinking that it ought to be limiting since everything has to be filtered through the narrator. With a third person narrative the writer can switch to different characters or tell you what other characters are thinking. But in practice I've never read a first person narrative where I was aware of that; good books are written in the first person narrative as well as the third person narrative. And a first person narrative is how we live our lives so maybe that's also part of why they can work well.
One of my first editing projects was a novel written in multiple first person – different narrators for different sections – and although it was primarily done in past tense, it had some sections that were deliberately written in present tense to induce a sense that something was not quite right. (They’re dream sequences, something that’s not obvious until the end of the first one. The author told me they always feel like dreams happen in the eternal now, so present tense felt natural for conveying that.)

The multi-narrator first person device works really well for showing things from different perspectives; in one case from that novel, the reader gets to see the same conversation as experienced by both speakers… including an important misunderstood word. It’s also really good for displaying paranoia or insecurity, because even though the reader may know better, sometimes characters jump to the wrong conclusions because they’re human and fallible. From an authorial perspective, first person is an excellent way to conceal plot cards; the reader is stuck in the narrator’s head, so they only know what the narrator notices. It can be harder to justify hiding some things from an omniscient third-person narrator.
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