Stuck in the middle characters4/9/2023 With first-person, you often have to come up with all these fake excuses and cool visual effects to vault back fifty years- look, is this a real and actual diary ? can I read it out loud for a while? With third-person, you just drop a sub-heading, something nifty like “1964,” and you’re there, no excuse needed. And third-person has the added benefit of not being ‘locked’ into a single time, either. So, if the natural mode or method for delivering fiction is first-person past-tense, then why ever shuffle across the room to third-, right? What people get from third-or, what they think’s unavailable via first-person, anyway (David Jauss says otherwise, and’s right)-is scope: instead of being ‘trapped’ in a room with their narrator and his or her limited field of view, they can now traipse across this world they’ve built or discovered, go to every last corner and look around, GRRM-style. This is because fiction is narrative, and narrative is selection, and selection is from pre-existing events, and events only pre-exist if they, you know, happened before. Note too with those examples that part of our natural mode for fiction, it’s past tense. But you, if your name’s Jimmy, say, never go Jimmy was standing in line for ten hours, and then this clown laughed at him and it had to be like eight thousand degrees. First-person is our natural delivery method, isn’t it? If you’re telling somebody about the amusement park last week, you do it like: I was standing in line for like ten hours, and then this clown laughed at me and it had to be eight thousand degrees and on and on, I’ing your way into some perfect punchline of a conclusion. With stories, we have default settings: first- and third-person, with third really being the deviance from the norm, the deviance from first-person. Ask ten people what they think about second person, and a good seven or eight of them will say that McInerney did it once, sure, and did it well, but outside of Bright Lights, Big City, second-person’s just a gimmick, is best left trapped in all the choose-your-own-adventure series from the eighties.
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