PART THE FOURTH: In Which I Talk About What Exceptional First Person Narration Can Do For A Book
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
First, I’m going to note something: Character voice is a very hard sell to me. I do not hear most 1stP narrative voices as being particularly unique.
Yes, as I noted in Part Two, none of these 1stP books sound alike. Aral Kingslayer and Cat Barahal and Rachel Morgan are different people and I would not confuse them if they were all in the same book, narrating alternate chapters.
But even as different characters, there is still to my ear a similarity to their narration, a way in which perhaps they’re informed by their authors being middle-class, educated Americans in the early 21st century.
I’ll note that all three of those characters are, in their respective milieus, the equivalent of educated, middle-class characters. They all had specialized training since a young age for high-skill jobs: Aral as an assassin, Cat as a spy, Rachel as a witch. (Heck, Rachel is a middle-class, educated American in an alternate 21st century!) They may not be using their skills in the way their education originally intended, but their skills are significant plot points and character traits.
Elisa d’Orovalle is a princess, not middle-class, but she is also highly educated and her education comes into play as a major plot mover in Girl of Fire and Thorns. Ana of Incarnate lacks formal education, but she is intellectually curious and desperately longs for knowledge and reading books, which drives her plot as well.
I don’t know if this commonality is significant. I’m just pointing it out because I noticed it, and I think this business of the POV character being all about the education is part of why I don’t find those narrators quite so distinctive as their authors probably hope.
Not that I insist all 1stP narrators be uneducated lunks. The three I’m going to discuss below are not. But all five of the above characters talk extensively about their highly formal education (or, in the case of Ana, her desire for education). Every single one of them. More than once.
They are also all able-bodied, young (age range: 16-29 [1]), and for the most part psychologically healthy. Aral is an alcoholic, which makes him a bit more distinctive, but even this effect is somewhat muted by him being a high-functioning alcoholic who swears off the sauce at least for the duration of the job he takes on at the beginning of the book.
(I should note that Ana being the only person in her world who isn’t a reincarnated soul is fantastic. She’s able-bodied and no more psychologically screwy than most of us, but her situation makes others regard her as kind of...spiritually deformed. A great twist on the disprivilege of being handicapped.)
On the plus side, not all of the lead characters are white, but those nonwhite characters have as much privilege in their world as a typical white person does in our world. Which I hope is a positive and enjoyable thing for persons of color, and I welcome this way to shift the “white as default” paradigm.
But reading as a white person, this sort of thing doesn’t force me into a new perspective on how the world interacts with me-as-vicarious-POV-character. Nothing wrong with that, but it's a "neutral" factor in the narrative voice, not contributing any distinction.
Not all of the narrators are entirely hetero, but again, they are all cisgender and what romance or sex does happen for them in their books is hetero.
While each of the characters has their disadvantages, in most ways they are reasonably privileged people. This is not unique to 1stP narratives, but it centers the first-person, direct voices of a class of people whose voices are already loud in our world. Which is to say that, in these common ways, the voices of these characters are not unusual.
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In Part Two I gave a quickie analysis to demonstrate that some first-person narratives are essential to their books, in that they cannot simply be flipped into third-person narration by swapping pronouns.
These are books that massively benefit from being told in 1st person. They wouldn’t be nearly as good--or even possible--if told in 3rd person. So now I’m going to discuss in more depth how they work--how they make use of the distinctive advantages of first person narration to maximize the impact of the story.
Let’s start with Karen Memory. Karen’s voice is highly distinctive. She has piles of idiom and turns of phrase that mark her place in time and her personality. She does not sound like any other 1P narrator. Without ever using eye-dialect, Elizabeth Bear gives Karen an accent.
I’ll also note that Karen is at best lower middle-class, has no exceptional education, and her job skills are not a plot-point at any time. Her one distinctive skill she mentions, breaking horses, is part of her past and her aspirations for the future, not a mover of the book’s plot.
I’ll also note that Karen is bisexual [2]. Her romantic interest in the book is another woman. That her girlfriend is female is not a plot point (a boyfriend could have affected the plot more or less the same way), but it makes Karen more distinctive, and therefore a more interesting narrator to me.
From the perspective of storytelling, having a 1st person narrator allows certain information to be compressed. Karen can interestingly sum up backstory efficiently in ways that would feel contrived if a 3rd person narrator did it. (I suspect this is a major reason a lot of writers go for 1st person.)
Plotwise, Karen Memory is relatively linear with a few subplots. It’s one thing after another while Karen and her friends try to figure out what’s going on, and then try to foil the plans of the Bad People.
But the narrative voice and Karen’s digressions give the book more richness than the plot alone. Take away that voice, and we lose all of Karen’s observations about the other characters. And so much of the fun of the book is the secondary characters and how Karen thinks of them, particularly how she admires them. A significant part of both the book’s and Karen’s charm is listening to her happiness to know these other people. Karen's optimism and enthusiasm for her friends and life is so infectious (without ever being Pollyanna), even a stone bitch like me got caught up in it.
Next to benefit materially from 1stP is The Hunger Games.
Katniss doesn’t think about things the way an educated, middle-class, 21st-century American would. Katniss has more education than others of District 12, but it’s informal, self-taught on a foundation of what her father was able to impart to her before he was killed.
Katniss’s skills are a plot point, but she doesn’t think of them that way. She knows her skill with a bow is an advantage in the Games, but all of the tributes from Districts 1, 2, and 4 deliberately trained for the Games. She knows they have tremendous skills that will benefit them in the Arena.
More to the point, Katniss doesn’t think of herself as a highly-trained specialist the way that Aral, Cat, or Rachel do. She thinks of her skills as something she learned because the alternative was starving to death. It was not a privilege to learn hunting and gathering; it was an illegal act of desperation.
She spends a lot less time thinking about what she can do than trying to figure out what the other competitors can do. She talks about Cato’s fighting skills, Peeta’s and Thresh’s physical strength, Rue’s ability to move through the trees and forage, Foxface’s intelligent strategizing.
As for social position, Katniss’s family is strictly lower class. They’re better off than other families of the Seam because of Katniss; they would be poor and half-starved if not for her.
Despite being played by Jennifer Lawrence in the films, Katniss in the books is described as olive-skinned with straight dark hair and grey eyes. She could be of many backgrounds, but Anglo-white isn’t one of them. Katniss notes obliquely that the poor folk of the Seam look like her, whereas the middle-class merchant folk (such as her mother, the mayor and his daughter, Peeta and his father) are all blonds.
Katniss-as-narrator is also a key element because of the psychological themes in the book. Even before she volunteers for the Games, Katniss is suffering from PTSD. Her beloved father was killed in the mines, and she and her sister nearly starved to death because her mother sank into an abyssal depression.
Katniss learned at age 11 that the adults who are supposed to look after her are undependable. We know this still preys on her, because her last words to her mother before being taken to the Games are an admonition to not fall into that despond again and leave Prim all alone. Katniss isn’t motivated by any desire to live. She wants to win the Games not because the alternative is her death, but because if she wins, then Prim will have good food and be safer. Katniss doesn’t care if she herself lives or dies, but she wants Prim to have a good life.
That psychological state would be incredibly difficult to convey in 3rd person narration. It would need to be stated plainly, which can easily be wooden. But it is absolutely a thing that Katniss reveals in her narration--
--though she never analyzes why she is solely motivated by Prim. Katniss is characterized by a lack of self-awareness. She is focused strictly on the moment, on dealing with what’s in front of her. Her ruthless practicality is her self-image. She doesn’t talk about it in those terms, i.e., “I’m very practical.” She just talks about what she sees and does and we understand she’s unsentimental...except when it comes to Prim.
When Katniss talks about Prim, she doesn’t acknowledge to herself that Prim is some exception to her “is it practical and useful” rule. (Similarly, in her mind, Gale is her reliable, competent hunting partner. She doesn’t consciously think about him being more than that until the situation with Peeta forces her to consider her feelings.)
As the Games go on, we the readers know more than Katniss does about what’s going on. (Which is a genius trick in tight 1st person.) There’s almost a paradox: narrated in 3rd person, those things would require the narrator to get a bit obvious or intrusive, which would weaken the effect.
Collins has things happen or characters say things that we interpret one way but Katniss interprets differently. Katniss-as-narrator can state flat out things that contradict our perspective, and we don’t think she’s being dishonest or even wrong--her perspective is valid from inside her head, with her experiences that are so different from most of ours.
If all of this were narrated in 3rd person, Katniss would be a lot flatter. Only by reading her thoughts and drawing our own conclusions from the subtext Katniss doesn’t see but we do, can we get the depth and complexity of this character.
But we’re not in Katniss; we’re not feeling her feels, vicariously being her. [3] She’s not an unreliable narrator, but she’s disconnected from her own emotions. The reader understands a lot more than she does. We know Peeta’s truly in love with her when she thinks he’s faking it for the Games. We understand Katniss’s feelings about her sister, and Gale, and Peeta, while Katniss is just focused on survival.
A 3rd-person narrator would state explicitly things that the reader now must infer. By narrating in 1st person this way, Collins forces the reader to engage closely with the narrative in order to figure things out. It’s the only way to convey the complex psychological evolution of Katniss Everdeen, which is the whole point of the book.
And my 3rd example of a book that requires 1st person narrative is Ancillary Justice. Like Katniss, Breq is motivated by feelings she doesn’t admit to or is mostly unaware of. But in contrast to The Hunger Games, this isn’t the point of the book. It’s just a nice bonus layer of engagement for the brain.
There are two main benefits to 1stP in Ancillary Justice:
1. The gender thing. It would be impossible to present the Radch concept of “we don’t think about gender that way and all our pronouns are she/her” unless the narrator was someone from the Radch. To do that in 3rd person would require a conceit such as a framing tale or Radch history book or some other such device that would call too much attention to itself.
By having a first person narrator, we get the she/her thing naturally. We get no acknowledgment of anyone’s gender (except Seivarden, about whom Breq explicitly says, “I knew Seivarden was male”), partly because Breq has a hard time telling what gender anyone is, and partly because the Radch language doesn’t make a distinction. There is some implication that Breq can’t make the distinction because her language doesn’t.
But in truth, for a justification of 1stP, the gender thing is secondary to...
2. Breq is the last remnant of a multipart AI. By narrating in 1st person, we get to enjoy a sort of 1st-person omniscient, at least in the past-history sections of the book. The ancillaries are standing on multiple street corners, or in multiple buildings. Justice of Toren can check on the feelings and well-being of its crew at any time via their various implants.
By being in Breq’s POV and following two storylines, we get the contrast of her as the omniscient AI Justice of Toren and as a single-unit remnant; we understand what she has lost. And in fact, how she has lost her old self twice: We are shown how a person is subsumed into the AI, and implication about how the person’s original personality might still be in there, in the form of Breq’s penchant for singing.
This also applies to the omniscience of Anaander Mianaai. In many ways, the emperor of the Radch is as much an AI as Justice of Toren, except in reverse: all of Anaander Mianaai’s bodies are clones of the same person, but they operate independently, and are capable of disagreeing with each other.
All of this is essential to the SFnal aspects of the book. To explain all that in a 3rd person POV would be dry. 1st person POV is the way to show rather than tell how these AIs work.
The developments with the consciousnesses of both Justice of Toren and Anaander Mianaai are essential plot points. This story cannot be told without the reader understanding the multipart nature of these two characters. Without first-person narrative, the book flat-out cannot exist.
[1] I have it direct from the author that the 29-year-old was originally intended to be 40ish, but the author was advised to change this. Speaking as a reader who loved the books, I'm kind of pissed off at his editor or whoever said to do this. I understand the realities of publishing, but Aral was much more interesting to me in the bits where he feels old and jaded; and every time Aral referenced something that placed him on a timescale making him younger than 30, it jarred me.
[2] I assume at least some if not all of Karen's clientele are male. She doesn't come across as the sort who just tolerates her clients for the cash; I get the impression she has fun a lot of the time, too.
[3] “It brings you closer to the main character” is a frequent reason given for using 1st person narration. This is nonsense. I feel a lot more in Miles Vorkosigan’s headspace than I do in Katniss Everdeen’s. I get to watch Katniss and be fascinated by her. I get to be Miles.