The Opinionated Narrator · 10:04pm Oct 28th, 2015
A Certain Point of View: The Opinionated Narrator
First person, second person, third person, limited, omniscient: that’s all we need to know, isn’t it?
Of course not, and I’m going to kick off with something I mentioned in yesterday’s formal review: the opinionated narrator.
So I’m going to assume that everyone reading this knows about the basic perspectives I’ve just listed. Those are the entry-level terms which I only need you to have a broad understanding of to start with, and I’m going to be specifically talking about third person, both limited and omniscient – after all, I think that’s where the biggest pitfalls and biggest payoffs come.
Third-person is a continuum from total dispassion, literally a camera’s eye view, all the way up to what is essentially first person with different pronouns. The problems usually creep in when a writer hasn’t thought much past writing in third person and decided what kind of third person.
Now, I’ll be going into psychic distance another time (also called narrative distance by some), but I wanted to kick off with a very specific issue because I see it crop up so many times it is getting just a little bit ridiculous. Given that third person can be very reserved or very intimate, even over the course of the same work, it is important to know what kind of language is appropriate at any moment. Nowhere is this more helpful (when used wisely, at least) than taking the opportunity for some good old telling. It’s amazing what you can get away with when you’re using a character's perspective to outright tell the reader something that would be completely out of place were it in the narrator’s voice rather than the focus character’s.
But you have to be sure that you have a narrator’s voice and a character’s voice, and that your reader can tell the difference between the two. Otherwise, you end up using words for impersonal narration that are completely inappropriate, and dare I say… opinionated.
The example from yesterday’s story was the adjective ‘downtrodden’. If I have a character describe someone as ‘downtrodden’, then I’m golden. My character is not only allowed to have such opinions, but having those opinions tells us something out his experience of the world. The problem is that another character might see the same figure and not only describe it a different way but actively reject the description of downtrodden – and so can your reader.
In that story, the problem was the the perspective was very flat and impersonal (including lots of emotional exposition) and also started head-hopping as soon as there were two characters in play. In that position, it’s pretty hard to assume that ‘downtrodden’ is meant as a kind of interior monologue, but even in more forgiving circumstances, it is important that you double check absolutely any word that isn’t a purely fact-based description. If your reader doesn’t agree with your opinion completely, you’re going to kill their engagement very quickly indeed.
So really it’s a show versus tell issue, but rather than being emotional exposition, which is usually what gets talked about, this is more of a fact-vs-opinion situation. Opinion isn’t expressly excluded from narration any more than telling is, but just the same, you’d better be absolute sure that you’re using it for very good reasons. If you're not… don’t.
Just as a quick example. Consider describing a room: you could say it is red and you’re safe; you could say that it is a vibrant red and you’re safe; but if you say that it is a garish red, then you have to be asking yourself ‘garish in who’s opinion?’ If there isn’t a character hold that opinion, then it’s your narrator’s opinion, which should be a giant red flag unless you know exactly what you’re doing.
Never tell your reader what to think. They must be allowed to draw their own conclusions.
-Scott ‘Inquisitor’ Mence
I agree with all of the above, and it's actually one of the big reasons I've become a greater fan of First Person. It frees you up to make statements like that—which isn't too big a deal in its own right, but which can be a powerful tool for characterization when you use it appropriately. The way a character views their world, the words they choose to describe it, says a lot about who they are.
Following from that, I have to say I'm interested to hear more about why you see Third Person as giving the biggest payoffs when done well. (I've got a guess as to why you're saying that, but my idea really only applies to large- and epic-scale stories, so I'm not sure why anyone would consider there to be a larger payoff at the short and novelette level than you could get with First Person.)
I'd agree with Bradel here and add that taking the idea to its extreme introduces the concept of an unreliable narrator -- where so much of the narration is couched in opinion and subjective perception that the audience has to read between the lines to figure out what's really going on. An unreliable narrator can be quite an effective device for building the narrator's characterization and adding some depth to the story. It both tells the readers what to think while at the same time challenging them to draw their own conclusions.
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While I certainly agree with the advantages of first person that you're both talking about, I would ask what aspect of that can't be replicated in third-person limited. That's why I think third has the greatest potential for reward: I don't think there is anything you can't do with it. I would suggest that first person is just easier.
I have stuff to catch up on still, so I'll see if I can go into detail in a full post tomorrow, but in the meantime, could I ask the two of you for examples of where first person really shines?
-Scott
Warning: I'm going to pontificate slightly in what follows.
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To me, this is basically the argument for why first person is preferable in certain situations. It gives you an easier road to getting the reader engaged which, to me, suggests that if you apply the same voicing skillset to third person and first person, you're going to get a stronger effect in first person. Also, because of the heightened effect, it lets you drop exposition more easily by just putting it in a strong voice. Exposition can often be the most efficient way to provide background in a story, but it always costs reader engagement. If you can exposit and provide character detail at the same time, it gives you access to some speed and efficiency tools you might not be able to get (or get as well) with third person. Character perspective in third person will let you do some exposition through the character's eyes, but it's not quite as engaging as getting the information in the character's actual voice. You could get full voice by doing exposition through dialogue, but that requires constructing a scene where you can do it, whereas in first person, the protagonist can just straight-up tell the reader.
The counterbalance—again to me, and like I was saying before—is that using first person largely restricts you to one viewpoint through an entire story. People will occasionally try doing a couple different first-person viewpoints, but even that gets tricky, especially if the perspective characters ever appear in scenes together. That can be very limiting in a larger story, obviously.
What I've heard is that, these days, first person is primarily getting used in YA fiction (where the scope of the stories is often smaller), with third person being a more general default. I suspect first person also sees more use in litfic, because of the way litfic stories are often built and how they frequently want character to be their primary focus. Giving good examples is harder, though. I haven't read enough lately to remember any instances that blew me away. I know Brandon Sanderson used first person in Steelheart, the first book on a YA trilogy he's currently publishing, and Steelheart is a pretty solid piece of fiction (albeit running heavily toward YA tropes in places, largely to appeal to the market). I don't think I've got a real opinion on how well it takes advantage of the viewpoint in particular, though—aside from just being pretty well written.
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I'd say the big advantage of third person is its freedom. Once you've mastered free indirect, you have pretty much the entire spectrum of psychic distance available. You can zoom in close for character insights -- the pull back for an outside view. When you do have a greater distance, you also have a choice of narrative voices. Even voices that aren't suitable for any available characters.
First person, on the other hand, is locked in to one distance and one voice by default. That makes it more limited, but also makes it easier to handle, because there's less room to screw up.
Are the times when first person is better suited than third? Well, yeah. If you only need one voicing, and one psychic distance, then bringing third in feels like overkill. A very close third-person that relies on strong voicing for the entire story would feel awkward in comparison to the same story told in first.
The last story I wrote on here used first. This was a deliberate choice, because the effect I was going for relies on the one character using two very different voices in different sections. Could I have written in in third and kept the trick? Probably. But it wouldn't have been necessary, and it would have muted the effect.
3505090 I think the greatest strength of first person perspective is that it enables the author to characterize the narrator through their narrative voice. It is possible to do this with a very tight third person limited perspective, but difficult with omniscient narrators (probably one of the many reasons third person limited narration is preferred over third person omniscient). Since I really appreciate the many examples you give in your Invisible Ink serries, I'll provide my own:
Talk about an opinionated narrator! That first line alone conveys so much information about Holden's character beyond the actual words on the page. The tone and voice establish Holden as the prototypical rebellious teen with disdain for all that's around him. He references Charles Dickens' novel David Copperfield (mocking it's opening chapter "I am Born"), indicating that he is well read and educated, despite the informal prose. Even the somewhat tortured sentence construction and wordiness of the writing helps to reflect some of the narrator's teenage insecurities, capturing the voice of someone who wants to sound smart (but also edgy, so he sprinkles obscenities around like most of us did at the age when we learned about curse words). Conveying this information through the narrative voice provides much more information density and adds considerable depth.
If you're looking for some recent pony examples, "The Wealth of the World" has an excellent narrative voice that evokes the analogous time period in human history that the story is meant to reflect. "A Flash in the Pan" provides a nice example of an unreliable narrator, where Twilight's obliviousness to the hints she's getting from everyone around her really highlights her naivete.
It's also the case that first person narration reflects how we experience the world ourselves, and so it allows the author to elicit a more intimate connection between the reader and narrator. Certainly, the first person perspective enables us to see the world through someone else's eyes, which perhaps is why most of the good novels dedicated to showing the experiences of marginalized groups (e.g. novels about being black in America like Invisible Man, The Color Purple, or Native Son) are all written in first person perspective (I double checked Native Son after posting, and it's third person limited, which shows that it's not impossible to achieve the same goals in third person). Maybe that's the dividing line between first person vs third person limited. Perhaps stories that aspire to realism tend towards the first person perspective because in real life, we aren't able to see outside of ourselves or jump between the heads of the various players in the story. In contrast, stories that aspire towards fantasy tend toward third person limited, providing a wider look at the world and letting us escape being stuck inside our own heads.