Learn About First-Person Point of View in Fiction

Learn About First-Person Point of View in FictionLearn About First-Person Point of View in FictionPoint of view in fiction simply means who tells the story. In the first-personpoint of view, a character in the story serves as narrator, using I or we as the story plays out. This narrator might be a relatively minor character, observing the action, as the character Nick does in F. Scott Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby. Or, he might be the main spielmacher of the story, such as Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salingers The Catcher in the Rye. Why Writers Use First-Person Point of View There are a number of good reasons for using the first-person point of view in fiction. Used correctly, it can be an extremely effective tool for storytelling You are writing a piece of fiction that is, at least to some degree, autobiographical. You want to be surethe reader sees the world you have created exactly as you experienced it. An example of this approach is Sylvia Plaths The Bell Jar,in which the main character is a thinly disguised version of the poet herself.You want the world youve created to be seen from a unique outsiders point of view. Both The Catcher in the Rye and Harper Lees classic, To Kill a Mockingbird, are told from the perspective of youngsters whose observations of the adult world are both naive and incisive. No third-person narrator or adult storyteller could bring the same qualities to these stories. You want the reader to experience only a carefully edited set of story elements and to experience them only from a particular point of view. This technique is effective in both literature and genre fiction. It often isused by romance and mystery writers to provide the reader with a sense that they are participating in the drama and uncertainty experienced by the main characters.You want to mislead readers and then- in some cases, at least- surprise them with a dramatic revelation. While it is possible to mislead readers with the third-person voice, it is much mora e ffective to do so through an unreliablenarrator. Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye is a classic example of the unreliable narrator. Another extremely effective use of the unreliable narrator is in Agatha Christies renowned mystery, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Multiple Points of View Some novels will mix points of view. This is more common in longer novels or more complex novels that involve multiple stories happening simultaneously. The author may decide each story has different needs in terms narration. Ulysses by James Joyce is a famous example of this. Much of the novel is written using third-person point of view, but several episodes use first-person narration. Pros and Cons Thefirst-person point of view allowsreaders to feel close to a specific characters point of view it lets the reader in, so to speak. It also provides writers with a tool for crafting the readers perspective on the fictional world. Using first-person also canbe easier for beginning writers since everyone is accustomed to telling stories from their own personal point of view. However, the first-person point of view limitsreaders to that one perspective. They only can know what the narrator knows, and this can make telling the story more difficult, depending on the plot and other characters involved.