When you’re reading a book with first person narration, do you read it as if the narrator is the writer, or do you read it as if you are experiencing the story through their eyes?
For example, say a first person narrator says, “I can’t read.” Would that shock you out of the story because obviously she can read because otherwise she wouldn’t be writing?
There is a short story by Robert Olen Butler called “Jealous Husband Returns in the Form of A Parrot” which begins like this:
So this guy dies and turns into a parrot, then his wife comes into the pet store and buys him, and it goes on from there. Needless to say, if you’re the type of person reading the story as if the narrator is ACTUALLY writing the book, you’re going to have problems.
On the opposite end of the narrated-by-an-animal spectrum is Don Marquis’ ‘archy and mehitabel’ serial. Marquis wrote a daily newspaper column and introduced archy, a cockroach, in 1916:
You can read the rest of this debut column here. Marquis wrote over 500 sketches featuring the cocroach.
I generally think about it as a story. For a real head-scratcher, see the series finale of the sitcom ‘Roseanne.’
No, not unless he specifically states it.
I recently read Koontz’s Life Expectancy, and very early on the narrator says something along the lines of “autobiography is a tricky task”. He mentions several times throughout that he’s the one “writing” the book.
I think you don’t assume it’s a book unless the character says so. Otherwise you’re just hearing the character’s thoughts, I guess.
Earliest first person narrative novel : Tale of Genji
http://www.taleofgenji.org/summary.html
I envision all narratives in the third person regardless of the pronouns used.
It’s an interesting question.
When I write in the first person, I tend to figure the narrator is a real person telling his tale to someone else, mostly becaue of a comment from one of my creative writing courses. Someone mentioned that that was how he envisioned first person narratives, but the idea seemed new to the professor. I like that attitude, though.
At the same time, it is generally not to be assumed that the narrator is actually “writing” the book. The narrator in a first person fiction narrative is usually not the writer, after all and to have him say, “I can’t read” is perfectly fine with me (since the narrative could be spoken, too.)
I don’t think Genji’s first-person, is it? It wasn’t in the translation I read. There seems to be a lot of people’s thoughts revealed as well. Also, the story spans a couple generations.
Genji dies in between one of the chapters, and the story continues.
(Yes, I know I’m spoilering a 1000-year-old book.)
Generally I will assume not, and definitely not if the story is written in the present tense.
In the book I wrote, on the other hand, I had actually envisioned it as that narrator is dictating the story to a friend who is writing it–though there is no way for the reader to know that. Of course it is written in the past tense.
I don’t think there is one answer suitable for all books written in first person. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time (I hope that’s the correct title) is written as though the narrator, an autistic boy, is writing a book. But, that book is much more self-aware that there is a book being written than most books I read. (He explains why the chapters are numbered the way they are, for example. The narrator doesn’t quite seem to get that most people expect book chapters to go 1,2,3 . . etc. so his doesn’t).
On the other hand, I’ve read other books where Reality Chuck’s comment about someone telling a story to someone else makes sense–but a literal book would not . . . for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on this morning.
And I’m pretty sure I’ve read some books where the sense one got was that one was seeing the events as they took place–through the narrator’s eyes. As opposed to a book like A Painted House by John Grisham, where the events are clearly being described sometime later . . . not just because of the framing story, but also because the narrator has an awareness of what events are important or the real meaning of some conversation. (This is not a great example because the events in this book took place in childhood and are being described some years later. I guess it feels kind of like an exaggerated version of what I’m trying to describe.)
For the most part, I assume that a first-person narrator is “speaking”–that is, telling their tale rather than writing a story.
There are, however, exceptions. For example, I believe that Dr. John Watson and Bertie Wooster were writing their memoirs specifically for publication; there’s a certain awareness that they have readers who are familiar with their previous adventures.
A lot of the time, unless they specifically mention writing the text, or that this is just their private thoughts, I would usually tend to assume that they’re dictating or telling the story to someone out loud. Not sure why that’s the default.
I was under the impression that Genji is the first novel in which multiple perspectives from within the character are revealed.
Which seems to be contrary to the OP.
:smack:
Depends on the book, of course.
To take to examples, Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone, at least in the early books, is writing case reports. Clearly she’s doing so for her own amusement/edification, as she is a sole proprietor, but the beginning and end of “A Is for Alibi” make it clear that Kinsey is recording her thoughts on paper.
Contrariwise, Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels allow the reader to see the world through Spenser’s eyes and hear his thoughts, but there’s no suggestion that he’s writing it all down.
I think of it that way too. When I read a first-person narration, I pretend I’m listening to a black-box recording of an event…a recording that takes place deep in the narrator’s subconscious mind, with a voice that doesn’t mirror their speaking voice. The subconscious “narrative voice” of the narrator is more articulate, insightful, and has much better recall than the conscious voice of the narrator. This explains why narrators can recite conversations verbatim and how they seem to know a lot more about the cast of characters around them than you would normally expect them to. This also explains why narrators who are mentally deficient or uneducated in the “world” of the story (like Ruth in The Book of Ruth or all the characters in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying) can seem surprisingly intelligent to the reader.
I love stories that switch between “present-day” and “past” voices for the SAME narrator. A good example of this is Wally Lamb’s I Know This Much Is True. Most of the story is told by forty-year-old Dominick Birdsey who we assume is “present-day”, but some chapters are told by six-year-old, eleven-year-old, and college-aged “Dominicks”. It’s like the whole book is a perusal of this one dude’s vault of black-box recordings. Instead of relying on present-day Birdsey to recount events that happened in his childhood, Lamb lets us hear from the Birdsey “on the scene”. Rebecca Wells also does this in Little Alters Everywhere. I think it’s a brilliant way to tell a story.