Editing First-person narrative (section)

==Styles==
With a first-person narrative it is important to consider how the story is being told, i.e., is the character writing it down, telling it out loud, thinking it to themselves? And if they are writing it down, is it something meant to be read by the public, a private diary, or a story meant for one other person? The way the first-person narrator is relating the story will affect the language used, the length of sentences, the tone of voice, and many other things. A story presented as a secret diary could be interpreted much differently than a public statement.<ref name=Ohio/>

First-person narratives can tend towards a [[Stream of consciousness writing|stream of consciousness]] and [[Monologue|interior monologue]], as in [[Marcel Proust]]'s ''[[In Search of Lost Time]]''. The whole of the narrative can itself be presented as a false document, such as a diary, in which the narrator makes explicit reference to the fact that he is writing or telling a story. This is the case in [[Bram Stoker]]'s ''[[Dracula]]''. As a story unfolds, narrators may be aware that they are telling a story and of their reasons for telling it. The audience that they believe they are addressing can vary. In some cases, a [[frame story]] presents the narrator as a character in an outside story who begins to tell their own story, as in [[Mary Shelley]]'s ''[[Frankenstein]]''.

First-person narrators are often [[unreliable narrator]]s since a narrator might be impaired (such as both Quentin and Benjy in Faulkner's ''[[The Sound and the Fury]]''), lie (as in ''[[The Quiet American]]'' by [[Graham Greene]], or ''[[The Book of the New Sun]]'' series by [[Gene Wolfe]]), or manipulate their own memories intentionally or not (as in ''[[The Remains of the Day]]'' by [[Kazuo Ishiguro]], or in [[Ken Kesey]]'s [[One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (film)|''One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'']]). [[Henry James]] discusses his concerns about "the romantic privilege of the 'first person{{'"}} in his preface to ''[[The Ambassadors]]'', calling it "the darkest abyss of [[Romanticism|romance]]."<ref>{{cite book |last=Goetz |first=William R. |title=Henry James and the Darkest Abyss of Romance |year=1986 |publisher=Louisiana State University Press |location=Baton Rouge |isbn=0-8071-1259-3 |url-access=registration |url=https://archive.org/details/henryjamesdarkes0000goet }}</ref><ref>[http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=35807&pageno=11 ''The Ambassadors'' (p. 11) on Project Gutenberg] Accessed 17 March 2007</ref>

One example of a multi-level narrative structure is [[Joseph Conrad]]'s novella ''[[Heart of Darkness]]'', which has a double framework: an unidentified "I" (first person singular) narrator relates a boating trip during which another character, Marlow, uses the first person to tell a story that comprises the majority of the work. Within this [[nested story]], it is mentioned that another character, Kurtz, told Marlow a lengthy story; however, its content is not revealed to readers. Thus, there is an "I" narrator introducing a storyteller as "he" (Marlow), who talks about himself as "I" and introduces another storyteller as "he" (Kurtz), who in turn presumably told his story from the perspective of "I".