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These critical interpretations both reinforce and describe a more popular apprehension of first-person narrative-that it is the most direct and natural form of storytelling. First person narration, the corollary would go, is more immediate and less contrived.
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Wood comments, “For Sebald, and for many writers like him, standard third-person omniscient narration is a kind of antique cheat.” The general argument, as advanced by Sebald, and more recently, by writers like David Shields and Will Self, seems to go: Flaubertian third-person omniscient narration is a jerry-rigged, mechanistic anachronism blithely ignorant of the historical context that renders it obsolete far from “realism,” it is almost wholly artificial, beginning in the first place with the artifice of a narrator and extending through the sleight-of-hand known as free indirect discourse (crudely put: the blending of narrator and character perceptions). In How Fiction Works, James Wood cites Sebald, decrying third person as obsolete following the horrors of World War II.
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Why does this matter? Because, I believe, third-person narration is the greatest artistic tool humans have devised to tell the story of what it means to be human. It worries me that we may be slowly losing the cultural ability or inclination to tell stories in third person. Whether this trend is significant and whether it will continue are debatable that it is a trend, seems less so. Essay and memoir classes have sprung up everywhere. As recently as 10 years ago, creative nonfiction specialist jobs barely existed at the university and graduate MFA level last year, there were more creative nonfiction job openings than comparable tenure track positions for poets. This is, of course, completely anecdotal and almost certainly statistical noise, to a degree. A completely random example: six of the last 10 National Book Award winners have been first-person narratives of the 55 previous NBA winners stretching from 2005 to 1950 ( Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm), the tally is 40 to 15 in favor of third person. When I flip open a story collection or literary magazine, my eye expects to settle on a paragraph liberally girded with that little pillar of self.Īnecdotal evidence tends to support this suspicion. In a workshop of 20 student pieces, I’m now surprised if more than a third are written in third person. My impression, as a writer and teacher, is that over the last 10 or 15 years there has been a paradigmatic move toward first person as the default mode of storytelling. We are surrounded by a multitude of first person narratives, vying for our time and attention, and we respond to them, in our work, and increasingly in our art, in first person. In its less exalted form, first person dominates our national discourse in many guises: the tell-all, the blog post, the reality confessional booth, the carefully curated social media account, the reckless tweets of our demented president. Essay and memoir are-have been for some time-culturally ascendant, with the lines between fiction and essay increasingly blurred (I’ve written about this here). That this is the age of first person seems undeniable. I cannot bear to read books of this kind.” – W.
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Any form of authorial writing where the narrator sets himself up as stagehand and director and judge and executor in a text, I find somehow unacceptable. “I think fiction writing which does not acknowledge the uncertainty of the narrator himself is a form of imposture which I find very, very difficult to take.