Just glancing at the shelves, The Tale of Genji is framed in several layers of storytellers and incorporated commentary. Frankenstein is a manuscript transcribed from dictation nightly and sent with letters. Even more straightforward first-person narrations, from Robinson Crusoe to Gatsby to any number of works by, for instance, Poe, are understood to be related by people of various motives and levels or reliability. More recently, Nnedi Okorafor and James Sallis have both provided first-person narrations that were told that way for very specific reasons bound up in the tales they were telling.
Good examples, on and all.
But I think over the past several decades, there has been a shift away from a first-person narrative as a narrative told/written/related by a real first person, for personal and not always apparent reasons, and toward a first-person narrative as a way of dazzling the reader with particularly clever observation -- the first person is less a real person than a voice-over narrating a cinematically conceived adventure. It's a narration rather than an artifact produced by a person. It's a form often adopted for fun rather than for reasons intrinsic to the story and the way the story has to be told.
True, at least in part. But I also think it's a hold over from the primitive storytelling, and the stories we are first told as children.
no subject
Just glancing at the shelves, The Tale of Genji is framed in several layers of storytellers and incorporated commentary. Frankenstein is a manuscript transcribed from dictation nightly and sent with letters. Even more straightforward first-person narrations, from Robinson Crusoe to Gatsby to any number of works by, for instance, Poe, are understood to be related by people of various motives and levels or reliability. More recently, Nnedi Okorafor and James Sallis have both provided first-person narrations that were told that way for very specific reasons bound up in the tales they were telling.
Good examples, on and all.
But I think over the past several decades, there has been a shift away from a first-person narrative as a narrative told/written/related by a real first person, for personal and not always apparent reasons, and toward a first-person narrative as a way of dazzling the reader with particularly clever observation -- the first person is less a real person than a voice-over narrating a cinematically conceived adventure. It's a narration rather than an artifact produced by a person. It's a form often adopted for fun rather than for reasons intrinsic to the story and the way the story has to be told.
True, at least in part. But I also think it's a hold over from the primitive storytelling, and the stories we are first told as children.
I'm not sure I've ever read a non-fiction memoir.