Choosing a Narrative POV
In my forays through writing forums, blogs, and advice columns, I’ve encountered a surprisingly large number of negative opinions on the use of the first-person narrator in historical fiction. There were a wide variety of reasons to support this stance against the first person point of view, some valid, others, frankly, ridiculous. Here’s a run-down:
The narrator must be at the center of the plot or risk “telling” rather than “showing"
Anyone relating a story about himself we dismiss as annoying and self-important
Readers prefer third person
The narrator writes like a 21st century grad student
First person narrators would never describe the kind of detail necessary to “paint the world”
The reader is stuck in one perspective, unable to experience the thoughts or emotions of other characters
Editors and Publishers shy away from first-person in genre writing
This last reason was told to me by one of my grad school mentors, a very successful science fiction writer. I’ll admit, it had me very concerned as I planned my novel.
But then I thought about all the historical fiction novels that I enjoy and realized that every single one of them was told in the first person.
If we look at that list of reasons not to write in first person, we can see that they all point to one thing: writing the first person narrator well is the problem.
First, the voice of the narrator must be authentic. Does this mean that your narrator must speak in their original language, or with the syntax common to the time period? I suppose that depends, but in general, I doubt anyone wants to read an entire novel that sounds like it was written by Yoda.
The narrators in Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord Chronicles (King Author) and Saxon series read like a private school, middle-class Brit might speak. Xeones, the Spartan Helot who tells the story of Thermopylae in Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield, sounds like a foul-mouthed officer in the Marine Corps. Both novels use colloquial expressions that might be heard on high school football fields or Army boot camps.
So it isn’t necessarily the language that makes the narrator authentic, but the voice itself. And that’s not an easy element to describe.
Perhaps this addresses the points above about the first-person narrator being “self-absorbed,” and unlikely to write in the sort of descriptive prose necessary for the conventional novel. The voice ceases to sound like an actual person, and instead resembles that of a faceless figure pounding on a word-processor. As so many writing sites suggest, one must be very careful in the amount of descriptive detail being slathered across the page. Too much or the wrong type of detail and the reader no longer believes the narrator is real.
Even more important, imagine what the narrator would be willing to reveal. If he is writing this story, then he is assuming that someone will read it. And in this case, he might attempt to put himself into the best light as possible, creating a conflict between the events unfolding and his perspective on them. This problem with reliability can create an intriguing dynamic to the story, as in John Fowles’s The Collector, where the mediating narrative constantly causes the reader to question reality in the text.
What it has always come down to for me is the reason behind the narrative. Why is this character compelled to tell this story? How and where is he or she writing from? Establishing these parameters in the beginning will help the reader accept the authority and voice of the narrator.
For example, in Cornwell’s Warlord Chronicles, the narrator tells the tale as an old man in a monastery, relating his experience with King Author in an attempt to tell the “real story” to a young and impressionable Saxon noblewoman. His age gives him retrospective insight, perhaps allowing him to be more self-reflective and objective.
In Gates of Fire, Pressfield uses this same story-within-a-story narrative technique with Xeones, who has been sent back from death in order to tell the story of the 300 to the Persians. Again, the parameters are established to enable the narrator a certain level of objectivity and self-reflection, as well as a bit of a magical touch to explain his eloquence in descriptive detail.
On the other hand, many mainstream novelists don’t bother with explaining the origins or reason for the first person narrative. Nelson DeMille, for example, has maintained a lucrative career with his narrator John Corey, a sarcastic ex-cop who constantly finds himself in the middle of national security crises. The voice of this narrative carries the story, but I’ll admit that after a while I became annoyed with the contrived nature of this point of view.
Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series features the first person narrator Claire Beauchamp, a WWII nurse who is shot into 18th century Scotland. Around the third book in the series, I began to question the narrative origins, and that is when Gabaldon began to intermix third person narratives of the various other characters.
My conclusion?
Know why the narrative exists in the first place.
Establish parameters.
Think about voice in every comment, descriptive detail, and reflective insight the narrator provides. Is this what the narrator would really say?
