1st Person Narrative and the Telling of Starlight's Story · 11:17pm Apr 10th, 2022
As the friendship lessons and self-realizations roll in (last two chapters!), it's time to talk about 1st person narrative. Starlight Glimmer is telling this story. I am just a conduit. 1st person narrative restricts story-telling unerringly to the POV of the narrator, again Starlight Glimmer. What is attractive about it is that Starlight knows nothing beyond her understanding of the world. Nothing she tells you, the reader, is fact. It is her opinion. To be more diplomatic about it, what she states about her world and the behavior of the ponies within it, indeed even how hers and others' magic works, is her understanding and the conclusions of her experience. Oh, yeah. Almost forgot. She's biased. While she is embarrassingly forthcoming, there may be things she omits or exaggerates. the same way you censor or exaggerate, and likely for the same reasons.
1st person should always be considered unreliable narrator. Whether the narrator is unreliable, is for you to discern and for the author to smile coyly about.
You can't do that in 3rd person. If you do that, it is you, the author, who is lying. You, the author then necessarily becomes a character in the story. That has it's place, but it isn't as well tolerated.
Exactly! I always see the first person narrative in this way. The story I'm in the middle of right now has Adagio as the main character and it's in the first person. Sometimes, people seemed confused why Adagio didn't mention certain things or take notice of something way earlier on and that's because the first person narrative is inherently biased. We will choose what to focus on and subconsciously ignore the things that seem irrelevant to us. I'm glad to see someone mention this! Especially since first person is such an underrated point-of-view for stories.