Editing First-person narrative (section)

===Reliability===
First-person narration presents the narrative through the perspective of a particular character. The reader or audience sees the story through the narrator's views and knowledge only.<ref>[http://signbook.persiangig.com/document/literature/theory/raavi1.pdf Ranjbar Vahid. ''The Narrator'', Iran:Baqney. 2011]</ref> The narrator is an imperfect witness by definition, because they do not have a complete overview of events. Furthermore, they may be pursuing some hidden agenda (an "[[unreliable narrator]]").

Character weaknesses and faults, such as tardiness, cowardice, or vice, may leave the narrator unintentionally absent or unreliable for certain key events. Specific events may further be colored or obscured by a narrator's background since non-omniscient characters must by definition be laypersons and foreigners to some circles, and limitations such as poor eyesight and illiteracy may also leave important blanks. Another consideration is how much time has elapsed between when the character experienced the events of the story and when they decided to tell them. If only a few days have passed, the story could be related very differently than if the character was reflecting on events of the distant past. The character's motivation is also relevant. Are they just trying to clear up events for their own peace of mind? Make a confession about a wrong they did? Or tell a good adventure tale to their beer-guzzling friends? The reason why a story is told will also affect how it is written.<ref name=Ohio/> Why is this narrator telling the story in this way, why now, and are they to be trusted? Unstable or malevolent narrators can also lie to the reader. Unreliable narrators are not uncommon.

In the first-person-plural [[Narrative mode|point of view]], narrators tell the story using "we". That is, no individual speaker is identified; the narrator is a member of a group that acts as a unit. The first-person-plural point of view occurs rarely but can be used effectively, sometimes as a means to increase the concentration on the character or characters the story is about. Examples include:
* [[William Faulkner]]'s short story "[[A Rose for Emily]]" (Faulkner was an avid experimenter in using unusual points of view; see also his ''[[Spotted Horses]]'', told in third-person plural).
* [[Frank B. Gilbreth]] and [[Ernestine Gilbreth Carey]]'s memoir ''[[Cheaper by the Dozen]]''.
* [[Theodore Sturgeon]]'s short story "Crate".
* [[Frederik Pohl]]'s ''[[Man Plus]]''.
* [[Jeffrey Eugenides]]'s ''[[The Virgin Suicides]]''.
* [[Karen Joy Fowler]]'s ''[[The Jane Austen Book Club]]''.
* [[Joshua Ferris]]'s ''[[Then We Came to the End]]''.
* Heidi Vornbrock Roosa's ''Our Mother Who Art''.<ref>[https://www.thenormalschool.com/print-archive#/volume-9-issue-2/ Heidi Vornbrock Roosa. ''Our Mother Who Art'', Heidi Vornbrock Roosa. 2011]</ref>

Other examples include ''[[Twenty-Six Men and a Girl]]'' by [[Maxim Gorky]], ''The Treatment of Bibi Haldar'' by [[Jhumpa Lahiri]], ''During the Reign of the Queen of Persia'' by [[Joan Chase]], ''Our Kind'' by [[Kate Walbert]], ''[[I, Robot]]'' by [[Isaac Asimov]], and ''We Didn't'' by [[Stuart Dybek]].<ref>{{cite news|url=https://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F01E3DF1538F93BA25757C0A9629C8B63|title=We the Characters|newspaper=[[The New York Times]]|access-date=2007-02-25|date=April 18, 2004 | first=Laura | last=Miller}}</ref>

First-person narrators can also be multiple, as in [[Ryūnosuke Akutagawa]]'s ''[[In a Grove]]'' (the source for the movie ''[[Rashomon (film)|Rashomon]]'') and [[William Faulkner|Faulkner's]] novel ''[[The Sound and the Fury]]''. Each of these sources provides different accounts of the same event, from the point of view of various first-person narrators.

There can also be multiple co-principal characters as narrator, such as in [[Robert A. Heinlein]]'s ''[[The Number of the Beast (novel)|The Number of the Beast]]''. The first chapter introduces four characters, including the initial narrator, who is named at the beginning of the chapter. The narrative continues in subsequent chapters with a different character explicitly identified as the narrator for that chapter. Other characters later introduced in the book also have their "own" chapters where they narrate the story for that chapter. The story proceeds in a linear fashion, and no event occurs more than once, i.e. no two narrators speak "live" about the same event.

The first-person narrator may be the principal character (e.g., [[Lemuel Gulliver|Gulliver]] in ''[[Gulliver's Travels]]''), someone very close to them who is privy to their thoughts and actions ([[Dr. Watson]] in [[Sherlock Holmes]] stories) or one who closely observes the principal character (such as Nick Carraway in ''[[The Great Gatsby]]''). These can be distinguished as "first-person major" or "first-person minor" points of view.

Narrators can report others' narratives at one or more removes. These are called "frame narrators": examples are Mr. Lockwood, the narrator in ''[[Wuthering Heights]]'' by [[Emily Brontë]]; and the unnamed narrator in ''[[Heart of Darkness]]'' by [[Joseph Conrad]]. Skilled writers choose to skew narratives, in keeping with the narrator's character, to an arbitrary degree, from ever so slight to extreme. For example, the aforementioned Mr. Lockwood is quite naive, of which fact he appears unaware, simultaneously rather pompous, and recounting a combination of stories, experiences, and servants' gossip. As such, his character is an unintentionally very unreliable narrator and serves mainly to mystify, confuse, and ultimately leave the events of Wuthering Heights open to a great range of interpretations.

A rare form of the first person is the first-person omniscient, in which the narrator is a character in the story, but also knows the thoughts and feelings of all the other characters. It can seem like third-person omniscient at times. A reasonable explanation fitting the mechanics of the story's world is generally provided or implied unless its glaring absence is a major plot point. Three notable examples are ''[[The Book Thief]]'' by [[Markus Zusak]], where the narrator is [[Death]], ''[[From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler]]'', where the narrator is the titular character but is describing the story of the main characters, and ''[[The Lovely Bones]]'' by [[Alice Sebold]], where a young girl, having been killed, observes, from some post-mortem, [[Out-of-body experience|extracorporeal]] viewpoint, her family's struggle to cope with her disappearance. Typically, however, the narrator restricts the events relayed in the narrative to those that could reasonably be known.