First person
- What is the first person point of view? [Source 1]
First person point of view is a point of view where the writer (or fictional narrator) relates information from their perspective. Perhaps they’re telling a story from their past, or maybe they’re giving you their opinion. If the main pronoun in a piece is ‘I,’ there’s a good chance you’re dealing with something written in the first person.
Just as the first stories you told as a child were likely in the first person, so were the earliest of all stories told in the first person, perhaps by our cave-dwelling ancestors. After all, if I were an early human trying to keep the attention of my fireside audience, which would be more compelling:
- a story about some random caveman nobody’s never met, or
- a wicked story about that time that I slaughtered a tiger with my bare hands?
In nonfiction, a first-person voice can lend credibility and immediacy to the writing: “I know this to be true, because I actually saw or did these things.” Readers get to relive the experience through a primary source, safe in the knowledge that this person knows what they’re talking about. (Having said that, we’ll later get into unreliable narrators, a phenomenon to which nonfiction is not immune.)
In this post, however, we will mostly focus on first person point of view in fiction — and how novelists and short story writers can use this viewpoint to their advantage.
Sources
Chat rooms • What links here • Copyright info • Contact information • Category:Root