History Main / AllFirstPersonNarratorsWriteLikeNovelists

* ''Room'', by Emma Donoghue, is told from the perspective of a five-year-old boy, Jack; while it's not exactly the way a five-year-old would speak and write (possibly justified, given Jack's upbringing), it's immediately very clear from the writing and syntax that it's a child speaking.

* Justified in the 6th Literature/{{Thursday Next}} Book, ''One of our Thursdays is Missing'', as the first person narrator is an in-universe first person narrator, having an adventure in between being read in her own in-universe book. If that makes sense.

-->--'''Mrs Bantry''', ''[[MissMarple The Thirteen Problems]]''

* "The Chymist" by ThomasLigotti is a justified variant of this trope: The character is an InsufferableGenius with an obvious penchant towards [[LargeHam self-indulgent soliloquy]], and hence speaks [[PurpleProse rather vividly]]. It's even {{lampshaded}} several times ''by the narrator himself'', as well as his companion.

* ''Room'' by Emma Donoghue, is told from the perspective of a five-year-old boy, Jack; while it's not exactly the way a five-year-old would speak and write (possibly justified, given Jack's upbringing), it's immediately very clear from the writing and syntax that it's a child speaking.

* ''The Perks of Being a Wallflower'' is another aversion of this.

* Mark Twain's 'Literature/HuckleberryFinn'' was criticized for (among other things) the hero narrating the way an uneducated 14 year old from the DeepSouth in the 1860s would talk. But that don't matter none.
* ChuckPalahniuk says his bare, stripped down SignatureStyle comes from trying to emulate how people naturally tell stories.

* The ''Literature/CiaphasCain'' series is a straight example, however it contains a rather appropriate justification: We're not reading the raw autobiography, but rather an editing of it to make it more readable. And even then, the originals... unique perspective still shines through in that the text is rather self centered and requires the editor to interstice it with other texts, each with their own characteristics and levels of readability.

* Oddly, both justified and averted in the first book of Megan Whalen Turner's ''TheQueensThief'' series in which the story turns out to be a book written by the scholarly and book-obsessed narrator in a much less scholarly style. Possibly justified or unjustified when the same thing occurs in the fourth book. (The narrator, who is not the same as in the first book, is telling the story verbally, not writing it down, but he's a rather sensitive and detail-oriented guy).

* Most of the stories in ''The Thirteen Problems'' by Creator/AgathaChristie, which are supposedly being told by different members of MissMarple's circle. The [[AvertedTrope exceptions]] are the last three: one is narrated by Mrs Bantry (see page quote), and mostly consists of the others asking questions in order to get any detail at all; one is narrated by a BrainlessBeauty who needs a lot of help to get the story straight; and the last simply doesn't maintain the framing device.
* [[JoesWorld Forward the Mage]] toys with this, as the story is narrated by a series of lice who write like very old-fashioned novelists of varying skill levels. This trope is probably why the lice exist in the first place: no one wants to read an entire book in [[SesquipedalianLoquaciousness Zulkeh's voice]].

* "Money" by Martin Amis is narrated by an ignorant, boorish, drunken (and sometimes amnesiac) slob, John Self, apparently as a suicide note. It's a very long suicide note, and for someone supposedly near illiterate, full of beautiful, if slightly strained, imagery.
* Justified in the 6th {{Thursday Next}} Book, One of our Thursdays is Missing, as the first person narrator is an in-universe first person narrator, having an adventure in between being read in her own in-universe book. If that makes sense.

* Mark Twain's ''HuckleberryFinn'' was criticized for (among other things) the hero narrating the way an uneducated 14 year old from the DeepSouth in the 1860s would talk. But that don't matter none.

* IainMBanks's ''Feersum Endjinn'' is written from the point of view of somebody who compulsively uses misspellings and abbreviations. Wich u mite thnk is vry kool, or just 2 anoyin 4 wurdz.

Sometimes this is justified in-story, by having the narrator specifically write a book about their own experiences and sometimes the narrator talks directly to the reader. Generally, though, most books have us read a detailed stream of consciousness, which isn't talking to anyone in particular.

->''I've been listening to you all and I don't know how you do it. "He said, she said, you wondered, they thought, everyone implied - well, I just couldn't and there it is!''

* "Money" by Martin Amis is narrated by an ignorant, boorish, drunken (and sometimes amnesiac) slob, John Self, apparently as a suicide note. It's a very long suicide note, and for someone supposedly near illiterate, full of beautiful, if slightly strained, imagery.

* ''PaleFire'' by VladimirNabokov is a first-person narrative disguised as a critical edition of a poem: the narrator is the editor, not the poet, who is dead. The "editor" slips his narrative into the preface and annotations, and it becomes increasingly clear that he resents the poet for not including his narrative into the poem itself. Then it becomes clear that the editor's an UnreliableNarrator and that the "true" narrative is lurking on an even deeper level...except that there might be an even more "true" narrative lurking beneath that one. And so on.

* Future!Ted from ''Series/HowIMetYourMother'' often displayed a rather haphazard narrative style (especially in the first three seasons), occasionally dropping random spoilers and explanations into the story instead of working them into the plot properly (e.g., pausing the action in "Okay Awesome" to say "Oh I forgot! This is important: your Uncle Marshall just had a temporary filling put in that afternoon" right before said filling plays a part in the story.) He also tends to meander around at random: for example, in "Showdown", in the middle of Past!Ted's best man speech at Marshall and Lily's wedding, Future!Ted suddenly interjects with "Oh wait! [[WhatHappenedToTheMouse I forgot to tell you guys what happened to Uncle Barney!]]" and spends the rest of the episode showing a completely unrelated scene from a different storyline, and doesn't come around to telling the wedding story until the next episode.
* The CiaphasCain series is a straight example, however it contains a rather appropriate justification: We're not reading the raw autobiography, but rather an editing of it to make it more readable. And even then, the originals... unique perspective still shines through in that the text is rather self centered and requires the editor to interstice it with other texts, each with their own characteristics and levels of readability.

* Oddly, both justified and averted in the first book of Megan Whalen Turner's TheQueensThief series in which the story turns out to be a book written by the scholarly and book-obsessed narrator in a much less scholarly style. Possibly justified or unjustified when the same thing occurs in the fourth book. (The narrator, who is not the same as in the first book, is telling the story verbally, not writing it down, but he's a rather sensitive and detail-oriented guy).
* ''FifthBusiness'' by Robertson Davies is a particularly {{egregious}} case. Elaborate writing aside, the first person narration comes off as a bit odd because the entire story is framed as a letter from the main character to the headmaster of the school that he works at. Said "letter" happens to be around 300 pages long, and it describes around forty years of the protagonist's life in intimate detail. When was the last time someone wrote their autobiography as a letter to a friend? Hell, how many envelopes can fit a 300-page letter?

* Tom from ''KingDork'', being a modern-day ''Catcher'', also avoids the "King's English" style of narration.

* Mark Twain's ''HuckleberryFinn'' was criticized for (among other things) the hero narrating the way an uneducated 14 year old from the DeepSouth in the 1860's would talk. But that don't matter none.

Yet, virtually every single first-person narrative in existence in any novel is dramatically-written, spends a lot of time on not just events important to the story, but also ones that build character, or even events not really important at all. Events are described in the same amount of detail that they are in third-person narratives. The narrator often uses a higher and more formal level of English than their own dialog. As far as structure goes, it's essentially the same as a third-person limited narrative, except it happens to be in first-person.

* Most of the stories in ''The Thirteen Problems'' by AgathaChristie, which are supposedly being told by different members of MissMarple's circle. The [[AvertedTrope exceptions]] are the last three: one is narrated by Mrs Bantry (see page quote), and mostly consists of the others asking questions in order to get any detail at all; one is narrated by a BrainlessBeauty who needs a lot of help to get the story straight; and the last simply doesn't maintain the framing device.

And yet, virtually every single first-person narrative in existence in pretty much any novel is dramatically-written, spends a lot of time on not just events important to the story, but also ones that build character, or even events not really important at all. Events are described in the same amount of detail that they are in third-person narratives. The narrator often uses a higher and more formal level of English than their own dialog. Basically, as far as structure goes, it's essentially the same as a third-person limited narrative, except it happens to be in first-person.

There's several reasons for this. For one, a first-person narrative allows readers to get into the main character's head in a way that a third-person narrative might not. It allows the protagonist to describe things bluntly or colorfully in a way that might look strange coming from a third-person narrator. (Although the LemonyNarrator, by definition, does so all the time.) It allows for a story that feels more "human", but at the same time, due to this trope, still reads like a novel and contains the same level of excitement.

It also allows for a more exciting story. When's the last time you heard someone describe an experience in as much detail as your favorite book? If they did, it would probably be a more exciting story... but also a much longer one. But this way, you get the best of both worlds: a story with the depth of storytelling of a novel, but the humanness of its protagonist infused into the narrative itself.

It can stretch plausibility to begin with [[FridgeLogic if you think about it]], but more so when the narrator is very young or uneducated, but hey, that's why we have the LiteraryAgentHypothesis. Or the MST3KMantra. This is pretty much one of those AcceptableBreaksFromReality that's so commonplace that we tend not to even notice it.

Sometimes this is justified in-story, by having the narrator be specifically writing a book about their own experiences, and sometimes the narrator talks directly to the reader. Generally, though, most books have us read a detailed stream of consciousness, which isn't talking to anyone in particular.

Sometimes writers try to avoid having the narrator sound too much like a narrator speaking the King's English, by having them write in an informal, more casual dialect. Even when that's the case, however, there's usually one consistency across pretty much all first-person novels: The events in the story are described in more detail than an ordinary person casually relating a story would likely ever give.

* "The Chymist" by ThomasLigotti is a justified variant of this trope: The character is an InsufferableGenius with an obvious penchant towards [[LargeHam self-indulgent]] [[HannibalLecture soliloquy]], and hence speaks [[PurpleProse rather vividly]]. It's even {{lampshaded}} several times ''by the narrator himself'', as well as his companion.

Compare RealisticDictionIsUnrealistic, FirstPersonSmartass, and MostWritersAreWriters.

* The first ''Lucifer Box'' novel does something with this trope other than play it completely straight. The narrator comes across as a bit of a rambling hack, seemingly trying to play this trope and failing miserably, but in such an entertaining way that it can only be deliberate by Mark Gatiss.

-->--'''Mrs Bantry'', ''[[MissMarple TheThirteenProblems]]''

There's several reasons for this. For one, a first-person narrative allows readers to get into the main character's head in a way that a third-person narrative might not. It allows the protagonist to describe things bluntly or colorfully in a way that might look strange coming from a third-person narrator (although not a LemonyNarrator, who specializes in such). It allows for a story that feels more "human", but at the same time, due to this trope, still reads like a novel and contains the same level of excitement.

!Due to the ubiquitous nature of this trope, only unusual variants or subversions will be listed:

* Oddly, both justified and averted in the first book of ''TheQueensThief'' series, where the story turns out to be a book written by the scholarly and book-obsessed narrator in a much less scholarly style. Possibly justified or unjustified when the same thing occurs in the fourth book (the narrator, who is not the same as in the first book, is telling the story verbally, not writing it down, but he's a rather sensitive and detail-oriented guy).

* ''Literature/AsILayDying'' is a good example of an aversion. All of the narrators talk like normal people, even if that makes the story really hard to follow.
* ''Room'', by Emma Donoghue, is told from the perspective of a five-year-old boy, Jack; while it's not exactly the way a five-year-old would speak and write (possibly justified, given Jack's upbringing), it's immediately very clear from the writing and syntax that it's a child speaking.

* "The Chymist" is a justified variant of this trope: The character is an InsufferableGenius with an obvious penchant towards [[LargeHam self-indulgent]] [[HannibalLecture soliloquy]], and hence speaks [[PurpleProse rather vividly]]. It's even {{lampshaded}} several times ''by the narrator himself'', as well as his companion.

Compare RealisticDictionIsUnrealistic, FirstPersonSmartass.

* ''AsILayDying'' is a good example of an aversion. All of the narrators talk like normal people, even if that makes the story really hard to follow.

* ''RiddleyWalker'' by Russell Hoban is a post-apocalyptic novel set in what used to be the English county of Kent. Riddley narrates the entire book in something like a phonetic transliteration of a Kentish accent. Example: "We ben the Puter Leat we had the woal worl in our mynd and we had worls beyont this in our mynd we programmit pas the sarvering gallack seas."