First-person narrative

First person narrative is a literary technique in which the story is told by one of the characters, who explicitly refers to him or herself as "I".

This usually means that the character in involved in the story being told. A strength of first person narrative is that the character must also express feelings, thoughts, and experiences, and must reveal him or herself; therefore, the reader usually gains keen insight into the life of the narrator.

The intensity of such confessional intimacy can be striking. First person narratives can appear in several form: interior monologue, as in Dostoyevski's Notes From Underground[?]; dramatic monologue, as in Albert Camus' The Fall; or written, as in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Since the narrator is a person within the story, they may not have knowledge of all the events. For this reason, first-person narrative is often used for detective fiction, so that the reader and narrator uncover the case together. Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd turned this principle on its head by revealing at the end that the narrator had been the killer all along, and had been withholding information from the reader.

Some first-person narrators, however, are detached from the events they recount in some way. In Wuthering Heights, the narrator is told of the events many years after they have occurred. The narrator is thus a framing device.

First-person narrative can tend towards a stream of consciousness, as in Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. The whole of the narrative can itself be presented as a false document, such as a diary, in which the narrator makes explicit reference to the fact that they are writing or telling a story.

Related topics

• Epistolary novel