Part One: Understanding First Person
The origins of the first person novel, in English, have its roots in personal writing. Unlike certain Eastern cultures, where first person narratives were, ultimately, an extension of myth and religion, or particular tribal cultures and history, the first person narratives, in English, originally mimicked the forms of letters and diary in an attempt to gain authority and create the purposeful illusion of reality, that the characters were, evidenced by these letters and diary entries, actually real people and, therefore, their adventures also real. Among the most famous of these novels are Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740), which structures itself as a collection of letters, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), which structures itself in the form of memoir and diary, and finally to a lesser extent Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1848), which incorporates letters into its narrative. The one notable exception to the trend, that early first person narratives in novel form were emulating personal forms, was Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688), the story of the grand slave, which takes the form of journalism, the eye-witness account of Oroonoko in the West Indies, a form that in its popular sense would be overlooked for some years, only to emerge centuries later, particularly in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century.
Because these early first person novels, for the most part, took the form of personal writing, their subjects and theme, either consciously or accidentally, usually focused themselves on the intimacies of personal life. Indeed, this must have been one of the primary attractions of reading these early novels, the opportunity to enter a person's private realm, the chance read private writings-to eavesdrop. Pamela, the first book that, in any great way, resembles the contemporary novel, documents the romantic correspondence and difficulties of Pamela Andrews: it is a story, based on an actual history of a girl with whom Richardson was acquainted, that took the form of letters, mainly to gain narrative authenticity, but by doing so demanded that the narrative be an intimate narrative, that the letters, to be believed, must also accurately render the internal thoughts and confidentialities which, during that period of history, defined personal written correspondence, and in this way, set a precedent, an initial model, that the English novel, at least in its origins, would stake out, as its territory, the personal, the intimate, a pattern which would effect the development of first person narratives.
Similarly, in Defoe's introduction to his own Robinson Crusoe, he, as author in the book's incription, pretends that he is merely the editor of a real person's (Crusoe's) memoirs, and in this way again appeals to the personal, though in a different form, designating this novel, too, to be a novel of intimacy. Likewise, Wuthering Heights (1848), though moving away from the structure of artifice, uses letters, especially those of Isabella, to substantiate the authority of the narrator. This pattern, the novel imitating other forms of writing, would be evoked repeatedly over the century which followed Pamela, the novel growing out of authentic forms of personal writing, so that when, in the early- and mid-nineteenth century, the novel began to form and establish its own rules of narrative, this tradition would follow it, especially in first person forms, that these narratives, though no longer imitating other forms of writing, would still include uniquely personal information, that first person narrators would give intimate and honest accounts of their own fictional lives.
This is paramount, I think, to understanding the form and function of the contemporary first person narrative, especially in its literary sense: because of its historical development, the contemporary first person narrator, through language and acuity of thought, is expected to render an honest and intimate record of his life; he is expected to, within the limitations and generosity of his own character, give a trustworthy account, as far as he is able, of the events that, in this novel, form the story. Along with this aim of internal honesty, the first person narrative is also, especially in its novelistic forms, still allowed great space for a narrator's reflection and digression, as is a writer of letters or diary, so much as these reflections and digressions generally help develop the story and that they define the intimate structure of knowledge which the narrator possesses. Finally, these first person narratives still hold the mystery of private knowledge, that even though there is now an often acknowledged or implied audience, first person narrators, in the majority of cases-as in Richard Ford's The Sportswriter, Mona Simpson's Anywhere But Here, or the short stories of Ethan Canin-still communicate for the sake of expressing intimate knowledge, much as they would to a friend or in the case of diary-writing to themselves, even though the effective illusion of letter- and diary-writing, in the structure of novels, has long been abandoned, but even after its abandonment, the first person narrator kept that initial tone of familiarity so that readers still, even with with structural illusions gone, believe they are getting a confidential peek into the center of a character's life.
copyright Todd James Pierce, 1999
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