A first-person narrative is a story told by one of the people in it, who refers to themselves as “I” (or, more rarely, “we”). The narrator can be the main character, as Jane Eyre is, or a witness to someone else's story, as Nick Carraway is in The Great Gatsby. Because everything reaches the reader through that one person, the reader knows only what the narrator saw, heard, guessed or found out later, and hears all of it in the narrator's voice.
Our guide to point of view compares first person with second and third. This page goes further into first person alone: how the telling works, the six kinds of first-person narrator and where they overlap, past versus present tense, common mistakes and a practice set.
How first-person narration works
In first person, the narrator is a character, and telling the story is something that character does. That puts three questions under every first-person book, whether the author answers them or not:
- When is the narrator telling it? Years later, with the ending known, or day by day, as things happen?
- Who are they telling? The reader, a sister, a judge, a priest, their own diary?
- Why are they telling it? To confess, to set the record straight, to warn, to defend themselves, to make sense of what happened?
The answers decide what the narrator can know, what they will admit and what they will dress up. They also create two versions of the narrator. Narratologists separate the narrating I, the self who tells the story, from the experiencing I, the self who lived it. Dickens lets the gap show at the end of a chapter in Great Expectations, after young Pip's first visit to Satis House:
That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.
The boy who lived the day has no idea it matters. The man writing about it does, and he turns to address “you who read this.”
A narrator who is writing a book can also choose what to leave out, and say so, as Jane Eyre does at the start of Chapter 10:
Hitherto I have recorded in detail the events of my insignificant existence: to the first ten years of my life I have given almost as many chapters. But this is not to be a regular autobiography: I am only bound to invoke Memory where I know her responses will possess some degree of interest; therefore I now pass a space of eight years almost in silence: a few lines only are necessary to keep up the links of connection.
The novel was first published as Jane Eyre: An Autobiography, and its last chapter fixes the moment of telling: “I have now been married ten years.” Everything before it is memory, selected and shaped by a woman who knows how the story ends.
Six types of first-person narrator
The six labels below answer three different questions: who tells the story (the protagonist, a witness, a group, several narrators in turn), when they tell it (looking back, or as it happens) and how far the reader can trust them. Tense is a separate choice again, covered further down. So most narrators carry more than one label: Nick Carraway is a witness and a retrospective narrator, and readers still argue about how reliable he is.
| Type | What the label describes | Who tells | Classic example |
|---|---|---|---|
| TypeProtagonist | What the label describesRole | Who tellsThe main character, about their own life | Classic exampleAdventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) |
| TypeWitness | What the label describesRole | Who tellsA friend, servant or bystander, about someone else | Classic exampleThe Sherlock Holmes stories, told by Dr. Watson |
| TypeRetrospective | What the label describesWhen it is told | Who tellsAn older self, looking back | Classic exampleGreat Expectations (1861) |
| TypeUnreliable | What the label describesHow far to trust it | Who tellsA narrator the reader learns to doubt | Classic example“The Cask of Amontillado” (1846) |
| TypePlural | What the label describesRole, for a group | Who tellsA group speaking as “we” | Classic example“A Rose for Emily” (1930) |
| TypeSeveral narrators | What the label describesRole, shared | Who tellsTwo or more “I”s in turn | Classic exampleThe Moonstone (1868) |
1. The protagonist narrator
The main character tells their own story. It is the most familiar form, and often the most intimate: the reader shares the narrator's thoughts without tags, and the voice is the attraction from the first line.
You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.
Three sentences in, Huck has a grammar of his own, a joke about his author and a view on truth-telling, and the reader already trusts him more than “Mr. Mark Twain.”
2. The witness narrator
A secondary character tells the main character's story. Textbooks call this the first-person peripheral narrator. The witness can admire, misread and judge the hero, and can keep the hero's mind closed, which is why the form suits detective stories and books about a magnetic, unknowable person.
To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex.
Watson knows what Holmes says, not how he thinks, so the solution can stay hidden until Holmes explains it. Conan Doyle let Holmes narrate a case himself in “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier” (1926), and Holmes opens by conceding Watson's point:
“Try it yourself, Holmes!” he has retorted, and I am compelled to admit that, having taken my pen in my hand, I do begin to realize that the matter must be presented in such a way as may interest the reader.
Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby (1925) is the other famous witness. He introduces himself as a man who is “inclined to reserve all judgements,” then a few lines later comes “to the admission that it has a limit,” and the rest of the novel is his judgment of Gatsby. Ishmael in Moby-Dick (1851) starts as a protagonist and gradually becomes a witness to Ahab. A related variant is the narrator of a frame story, who passes on what someone else told him. Lockwood in Wuthering Heights (1847) hears most of the story from the housekeeper, Nelly Dean, so the reader gets two filters at once, and he begins by misreading nearly everything in front of him:
“Ah, your favourites are among these?” I continued, turning to an obscure cushion full of something like cats.
“A strange choice of favourites!” she observed scornfully.
Unluckily, it was a heap of dead rabbits.
3. The retrospective narrator
Many first-person novels are retrospective: the narrator tells the story after it is over. That allows hindsight (“I did not know then that…”), commentary on the younger self and a shape chosen in advance, as in the Pip and Jane passages above. Memoir works the same way, and the guide to writing a memoir covers the narrating self in nonfiction. The further back the narrator stands, the more they can explain, and the more they have to hold back if the reader is still to worry about what happens next. The opposite is the immediate narrator, who writes as events unfold, in a diary, in letters or in the present tense, and doesn't know the ending.
4. The unreliable narrator
An unreliable narrator gives an account the reader learns not to take at face value, because the narrator lies, leaves things out, misunderstands or judges badly. First person is the natural home of the form. The glossary entry covers the types and how to plant the clues. Here the point is how the telling situation gives the narrator away:
The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge. You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that I gave utterance to a threat.
The narrator never names the insult, and he is talking to someone who, he says, knows “the nature of my soul.” The last lines say no one has disturbed the bones “for the half of a century,” so this is a murderer telling his story fifty years later, to a listener the reader is left to guess at. The reader learns more from what he won't explain than from what he does.
5. The plural narrator
First-person plural gives the voice to a group: a town, a family, an office. No one speaker is identified. The “we” knows what the group knew, repeats its gossip and shares its blind spots, and it can describe a person the way a whole community saw them. William Faulkner's “A Rose for Emily” (1930) is told by the town that watched Miss Emily for decades. Jeffrey Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides (1993) is narrated collectively by the neighborhood boys, and Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End (2007) by the staff of a Chicago advertising agency. The plural voice is hard to sustain for a whole novel, and it tends to work best when the group itself is the subject.
6. Several first-person narrators
A novel can hand the “I” from one narrator to another. Wilkie Collins built The Moonstone (1868) this way and explained the plan inside the book. Franklin Blake sets it out for the house-steward, Gabriel Betteredge, who writes the first part:
We have certain events to relate, and we have certain persons concerned in those events who are capable of relating them. Starting from these plain facts, the idea is that we should all write the story of the Moonstone in turn—as far as our own personal experience extends, and no farther.
Mary Shelley nests her narrators instead. Frankenstein (1818) opens with letters from the explorer Robert Walton to his sister, inside which Victor Frankenstein tells his story, inside which the creature tells his (“It is with considerable difficulty that I remember the original era of my being”). Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), an epistolary novel, rotates journals, letters and diaries, most of them headed with the writer's name. Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's “In a Grove” (1922) tells one killing through several narrators whose accounts don't agree, and William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying (1930) passes the narration among the members of a family and their neighbors. With several narrators, it helps if each voice is recognizable without its label, and each needs something only that narrator can tell.
Strengths and limits of first person
| What first person gives you | What it costs |
|---|---|
| What first person gives youA distinct voice on every line | What it costsA dull or generic narrator can sink the whole book |
| What first person gives youThoughts without tags or italics | What it costsNo other character's thoughts, except as guesses |
| What first person gives youSuspense built in: the reader knows only what the narrator knows | What it costsScenes the narrator misses must be reported, overheard or read |
| What first person gives youRoom for bias, error and lies | What it costsThe reader may not notice the bias unless you plant signals |
| What first person gives youHindsight and reflection, if the narrator looks back | What it costsIn a retrospective telling, the reader knows the narrator survived |
| What first person gives youIntimacy with one mind | What it costsThe narrator's own appearance is awkward to describe |
Writers have standard ways around each cost. Scenes the narrator can't witness arrive as letters, documents, overheard conversations or other characters' accounts. Appearance comes through what other people say to the narrator or how they react. The survival problem is smaller than it looks: if the reader knows the narrator lived, the question becomes what it cost them, and many first-person books rest on that question. The ambition to see everything is the one cost you can't get around. Big sagas and many-stranded plots often turn to third person omniscient or several narrators.
If you are choosing between first person and close third, the deciding question is the voice. When the way the narrator talks is the attraction, or the story is about how one person tells it, first person is usually the stronger choice. When you want to move in and out of the character, describe them easily or add viewpoints later, close third is more flexible. The guide to third person limited compares the two line by line.
Past or present tense?
Point of view and tense are separate choices, but in first person they shape each other, because tense decides when the narrator is speaking from.
| First person, past tense | First person, present tense | |
|---|---|---|
| Where the narrator stands | First person, past tenseAfter the events, though how long after can stay vague | First person, present tenseInside the events, moment by moment |
| Hindsight | First person, past tenseAvailable: can foreshadow, explain and judge, or hold back | First person, present tenseUsually none: knows only this moment |
| Effect | First person, past tenseReflective, shaped, deliberate | First person, present tenseImmediate, tense, breathless |
| Common in | First person, past tenseClassic fiction, literary fiction, memoir | First person, present tenseYoung adult fiction, thrillers, some literary fiction |
| Risk | First person, past tenseToo much explaining from the future | First person, present tenseLittle room to summarize or reflect |
Diaries and letters sit between the two. Each entry is written in the past tense about the day and in the present about the writer's state of mind, so the narrator is always only a few hours behind events. That is how Jonathan Harker's journal in Dracula can say, during his first days in the castle, “I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own soul.” Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) uses the same closeness, and adds a narrator who has to hide the fact that she is writing at all:
John is a physician, and perhaps—(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)—perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster.
The narrator tells the page what she can't tell her husband. Because she writes without hindsight, the reader watches her mind change entry by entry, with none of the explanation a retrospective narrator would give.
First-person present runs through contemporary young adult fiction, with The Hunger Games as the best-known case. Some novels wrap a past-tense story in a present-tense frame, such as the narrator at a funeral. Either way, keep the main narrative in one tense and switch only on purpose.
Common first-person mistakes
- The wall of “I”. Paragraphs where every sentence starts with I. Start with what the narrator notices instead, and the “I” recedes.
- Knowing other minds. “She was furious” states a fact the narrator can't have. “Her jaw set, and she stopped looking at me” is something they can see.
- The mirror scene. The narrator studies their own face to describe it for the reader. Let another character remark on it, or let one detail surface when it matters.
- The author's vocabulary. A sixteen-year-old narrator who thinks in the words of an English professor. In an immediate telling, every word should be one this person would use at that age; a retrospective narrator can use the words of the adult telling it.
- Hindsight on every page. “Little did I know” used once can chill a scene. Used every chapter, it can drain the suspense.
- Filtering. “I saw the door open” and “I heard a car” put the narrator between reader and event. Unless the act of noticing matters, cut the filter words: “The door opened. A car pulled into the drive.”
Before. I walked into the kitchen. I saw that the window was open. I felt the cold and I wondered who had left it like that. I closed it.
After. The kitchen window was open again, and the cold had got into everything: the bread, the tiles, the handle of the kettle. Somebody had left it like that. I shut it hard enough to rattle the glass.
Four sentences that began with “I” became one. The filters (saw, felt, wondered) are gone, and the narrator's irritation shows in an action, shutting the window hard enough to rattle it, instead of being reported.
In a long chapter, ask the Strokes Assistant to list the paragraphs where most sentences start with “I,” and any sentence that states another character's thoughts as fact.
How to write a first-person narrative
- Choose who tells
The person the story changes most is the usual choice of narrator. The friend who watches them change is the alternative, and often the better one when the main character must stay a mystery.
- Fix the moment of telling
Write down when, to whom and why your narrator is telling the story, in one sentence each: “Ten years later, to her daughter, to explain why she left.” The book may never state it, but every choice of what to reveal follows from it.
- Choose the tense
Past tense if the narrator looks back and the reflection matters. Present tense, or a diary, if the reader should share the narrator's ignorance of what comes next.
- Build the voice
Decide the narrator's vocabulary, sentence rhythm, sense of humor, and what they notice first in a room. Write a page of them talking about something unimportant, such as breakfast or the weather, until you can hear them. The Voice section of the character profile template is a good place to keep these notes.
- Decide what they don't know or won't say
List what the narrator misunderstands, what they hide and what they never find out. These gaps are where the reader does the work, and where an unreliable narrator starts.
- Plan the scenes they can't witness
For each important event the narrator misses, choose how the reader learns of it: a letter, a report, a confession, a conversation overheard through a door. If too many key scenes happen offstage, the book may need a second narrator.
Practice: one moment, four narrators
Here is a single moment, a boy jumping from a quarry ledge while his brother Danny counts, told by four kinds of first-person narrator. Each version meets a different limit on what it can know.
Protagonist, present tense. The ledge is warm under my feet and the water is very far down. Danny says on three. He has already said on three twice, and I can't tell yet whether my legs are going to listen.
Protagonist, looking back. I was eleven the summer I jumped from the ledge at Haskell's quarry, and I would like to say I did it because I was brave. I did it because Danny had counted to three a third time, and I could not stand to hear him do it again. Why he kept counting, I never asked.
Witness. My brother went off the ledge on the third three, whatever he tells people now. I was the one counting. Just before he went he looked at me as if I had pushed him, and I still don't know what he saw.
Plural. Every boy in Corran went off the ledge at Haskell's sooner or later. We were down on the flat rocks the day the younger Byrne boy went, and by suppertime we had agreed that Danny pushed him. None of us had been close enough to see.
The present-tense boy can't know what happens next, not even whether he will jump. The older narrator knows the ending and his own reason, and still not his brother's. The witness sees his brother's face and can't see behind it, and he has a motive of his own (“whatever he tells people now”). The plural voice knows what the town agreed on afterward, from too far away to know what happened. Now try it with a moment from your draft:
- Write the moment in first person present, with no hindsight at all.
- Rewrite it twenty years later, with one sentence of judgment from the older narrator.
- Give it to a witness who has a reason to tell it differently.
- Write the same paragraph as “we,” the people who watched.
- For each version, write down one thing that narrator can't know. If two versions share the same blind spot, change one of them.
Frequently asked questions
What is an example of a first-person narrative?
Moby-Dick (1851) opens with one of the best known: “Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.” The narrator says “I”, is a character in the story, and tells it years afterward.
Can a first-person narrator know other characters' thoughts?
Not directly. A first-person narrator can report what other people say and do, guess at what they feel, or learn their thoughts later from a letter or a confession. Stating another character's thoughts as fact breaks the point of view, unless the narrator is clearly imagining them or found out afterward.
Can a novel mix first-person and third-person chapters?
Yes, if the pattern is clear. Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1852–53) alternates Esther Summerson's first-person chapters, told in the past tense, with a third-person narrator who speaks in the present tense, and each chapter keeps to one mode. Some thrillers give the detective first-person chapters and the killer third-person ones. Switch at chapter breaks, and make each chapter's mode clear in its opening line.
