By Maddy Higgins
The issue of personal pronouns and tense structures, which make up the semantic design of a piece of writing, in fiction has been a point of contention for a long time. In the 16th century, the Spanish picaresque adventure genre was one of the few of the era that told stories from the first-person perspective. This was odd even then, because in a fictional world, shouldn’t the focus be on the landscape, not individual characters? Those who study the genre argue that in a picaresque, the “point” of the story is the hero, the pícaro, and his strength and courage, so the choice of “I” perspective makes thematic sense.
With the rise of literary modernism in the early 20th century, authors and poets shifted their focus to writing about the subjective human experience, rather than true reality. And so, first-person narration quickly rose in popularity, and that change is visible even now. 68% of the most popular books published in 2022 are first-person narratives.
Why does this matter? Well, the choice of personal pronouns is not an arbitrary decision; it deeply impacts the novel’s internal logic and style.
Third-person fiction remains in the realm of, in the words of Michal Glowinski in his essay “On the First Person Novel”, “quasi-objective” storytelling, in which the reader is supposed to accept the text as complete objective truth (within the bounds of the fictional universe, of course), contrasting with the inherently subjective nature of the first person novel.
Consider the statement, “the weather was unnatural that day.” Had it been told from a third-person narrator, it would be clear that the weather was indeed objectively abnormal. However, had it been told from a first-person narrator, there would be no way to know if the weather was objectively unnatural, or if that is simply the subjective view of one person within the world of the story. Perhaps our protagonist is an alien from Neptune visiting Earth on holiday, so of course, the weather patterns of our planet would be extremely unnatural. Or maybe we are to accept the “objective” truth is and should always be shaped by the biased view of the narrator. Does the fact that the Neptunian sees the weather as unnatural make it so, as long as we are within his world and his story? So many questions! Maybe it’s time to close this tangent.
This is not to discount a more closed third-person point of view instead of an omniscient narration, where, like in a first-person novel, the internal thoughts of the protagonist are stated as fact. For example, in a very closed third-person narration, the statement “Ned thought Fred was a scoundrel” would simply be “Fred was a scoundrel” if the story was told from Ned’s third-person perspective, with the understanding on the reader’s part that the internal projections of Ned do not represent objective truth. The reader also knows that the whole story isn’t being told to us personally by Ned but by an unknown third-person overseer. Of course, the omniscient to closed narration is a spectrum, and often writers like to switch back and forth from a more omniscient to a more closed perspective. This type of more personal third-person novel has in recent decades become the dominant type of third-person narration, which I see as going hand in hand with the rise in popularity of first-person narration. I personally think we should get more judgy omniscient narrators, given that I am a die-hard Jane Austen fan, but that’s just me and my totally objective first-person account.
In any case, what truly sets apart the semantic choice of personal pronouns in fiction is the fact that a first-person narrator lives on an equal playing field as everyone else in the novel. And, as stated by Glowinski, “in first person narration, the narrator’s possession of information is as important as his lack of it.” This brings into consideration the existence of the unreliable narrator. Although the unreliable narrator can exist in both realms of narration, it is more common in first-person fiction for obvious reasons.
Therefore, the very existence of first-person narration conflicts with the idea that novels are trustworthy chronological accounts of events. To solve this issue, most first-person narrators assimilate to a more quasi-objective storytelling format (i.e. if the narrator states that the weather is unnatural, it probably just is.)
But this brings us down a slippery path: if a third-person narrator is a sometimes omniscient, always objective figure telling the story of fictional characters in a fictional world, what does that make the first-person narrator? Glowinski proposes that we view the first-person novel as a very long quotation, which is a helpful way to view it, but it raises its own line of questioning. Are we to assume that the narrator has a perfect recollection of the events of the novel? Are we to question everything they say as their interpretation of the fact? Some authors pose answers to these questions, and some do not.
One novel that supports Glowinski’s idea is Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. The novel is told from the first-person perspective of Mr. Lockwood, an English gentleman visiting the Yorkshire moors. Lockwood visits the titular Wuthering Heights and soon begins conversing with Nelly, the housekeeper, who begins a multiple-chapters-long tale of the childhood of Catherine, her brother, and Heathcliff, told entirely within quotation marks. There are some interruptions where the story returns to Mr. Lockwood, but for the majority of the section, the story we as the readers are following is Nelly’s, not Lockwood’s. Mr. Lockwood interviews a few other characters with their own tales. Therefore, it is not a far stretch to assume that Mr. Lockwood’s own narrative is a version of this kind of story, where he is relaying his own tale to us, the audience. One other famous example of this kind of story is The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, an English literary work from the 14th century.
If I got anything across here, I hope it is that this choice of semantic design in a novel is the farthest thing from random, whether it is in the first person or third.
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