Oh, my god, this is gonna be such a rant, you don't even know ;D There's a tl:dr at the end if you wanna. (Also, you have excellent taste in 1st person literature, Birds, seriously.)
I loathe 1st person with the fire of a thousand suns--in general. More specifically...I'm incredibly picky and judgmental, and I can turn into a total jerkface about it. Again, there's seriously a tl;dr at the bottom. Feel free to make use of it.
In grad school, we devoted an entire semester to 1st person, which seemed excessive at first, although by the end I felt like it was warranted. The teacher was amazing, though, as when she said that technically speaking, ALL 1st person fics are unreliable narrator fics--or they should be, because we all view the world subjectively, with varying degrees of accuracy and honesty. Every single word is filtered through a character's internal bullshit, and since we're all colored by where we come from and how we got here, and most of us give our behavior about as much thought as we give a sitcom, we're all a skewed reality, or at least, we should be. (Which isn't as problematic in 3rd person--which we spent another entire semester on, ffs). It takes a lot of skill on the part of the writer to offer readers an objective look at an inherently subjective person.
Obviously, this broke my brain, and it made me aware of the flaws of a lot of 1st person narrators, which made me hate hate hate it, because all I did was think--is this the narrator I'm hearing or the author? In 3rd, we expect some authorial interpretation, but that shouldn't exist in 1st at all, and it's so terribly hard to weed it out. And then there's the fact that no one thinks as orderly as fiction must write--we're all a mass of intruding thoughts and emotions and it's rare to come across a book that captures the unwieldy nature of inner thought while also still being readable. Which is sort of the fourth wall of fiction, I suppose--in that we all know that's not really what thought is like, but we pretend we're all organized thinkers because no one really wants to read that stream of consciousness shit or else Ulysses would be more than an exercise in elitism for undergrad lit students. But it can feel disingenuous to me in 1st, whereas in 3rd, I'm just grateful to the author for putting shit in some semblance of order.
The exception to my jerkface, though, is books with a very distinctive narrative voice--including pretty much every book you listed, which is why they work for me. Lolita is one of the most brilliant fucking books ever--pun both intended and not, I suppose--because Humbert Humbert is basically the definition of 1st person done right. Every time I read it, I think "I will never write that well and I should give it up now to go do glassblowing or some such." I can read some Draco 1st person fics--in the hands of a good writer, the sneer, sarcasm, and vulnerability, all add up to a very distinctive personality. And everybody in this fandom knows Draco, uh, intimately, ahem--we know when someone gets Draco wrong, and we know when someone gets him right. This is why your 1st person fics are some of the very few I don't automatically back-button--you get Draco, so you do him right. And then you have Harry do him right. XP I can only think of a handful of 1st person fics with Harry as narrator that I've made it through, though. He tends to suffer from generic narrator syndrome, where the voice is so bland that we might as well let the wallpaper narrate the story.
Um, this is probably way more than you were looking for, wasn't it? Like way, way more. Why do you have to make me think so hard, Birds? WHY? (Actually that's a front-- I love stuff like this and you're awesome for having deep writerly thoughts and asking us to have deep writerly thoughts in return.).
tl;dr: First person is complete horseshit unless it's done really well, and that's really hard, so...yeah, usually horseshit. And Birds is cool. ;P
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2016-05-20 09:04 pm (UTC)I loathe 1st person with the fire of a thousand suns--in general. More specifically...I'm incredibly picky and judgmental, and I can turn into a total jerkface about it. Again, there's seriously a tl;dr at the bottom. Feel free to make use of it.
In grad school, we devoted an entire semester to 1st person, which seemed excessive at first, although by the end I felt like it was warranted. The teacher was amazing, though, as when she said that technically speaking, ALL 1st person fics are unreliable narrator fics--or they should be, because we all view the world subjectively, with varying degrees of accuracy and honesty. Every single word is filtered through a character's internal bullshit, and since we're all colored by where we come from and how we got here, and most of us give our behavior about as much thought as we give a sitcom, we're all a skewed reality, or at least, we should be. (Which isn't as problematic in 3rd person--which we spent another entire semester on, ffs). It takes a lot of skill on the part of the writer to offer readers an objective look at an inherently subjective person.
Obviously, this broke my brain, and it made me aware of the flaws of a lot of 1st person narrators, which made me hate hate hate it, because all I did was think--is this the narrator I'm hearing or the author? In 3rd, we expect some authorial interpretation, but that shouldn't exist in 1st at all, and it's so terribly hard to weed it out. And then there's the fact that no one thinks as orderly as fiction must write--we're all a mass of intruding thoughts and emotions and it's rare to come across a book that captures the unwieldy nature of inner thought while also still being readable. Which is sort of the fourth wall of fiction, I suppose--in that we all know that's not really what thought is like, but we pretend we're all organized thinkers because no one really wants to read that stream of consciousness shit or else Ulysses would be more than an exercise in elitism for undergrad lit students. But it can feel disingenuous to me in 1st, whereas in 3rd, I'm just grateful to the author for putting shit in some semblance of order.
The exception to my jerkface, though, is books with a very distinctive narrative voice--including pretty much every book you listed, which is why they work for me. Lolita is one of the most brilliant fucking books ever--pun both intended and not, I suppose--because Humbert Humbert is basically the definition of 1st person done right. Every time I read it, I think "I will never write that well and I should give it up now to go do glassblowing or some such." I can read some Draco 1st person fics--in the hands of a good writer, the sneer, sarcasm, and vulnerability, all add up to a very distinctive personality. And everybody in this fandom knows Draco, uh, intimately, ahem--we know when someone gets Draco wrong, and we know when someone gets him right. This is why your 1st person fics are some of the very few I don't automatically back-button--you get Draco, so you do him right. And then you have Harry do him right. XP I can only think of a handful of 1st person fics with Harry as narrator that I've made it through, though. He tends to suffer from generic narrator syndrome, where the voice is so bland that we might as well let the wallpaper narrate the story.
Um, this is probably way more than you were looking for, wasn't it? Like way, way more. Why do you have to make me think so hard, Birds? WHY? (Actually that's a front-- I love stuff like this and you're awesome for having deep writerly thoughts and asking us to have deep writerly thoughts in return.).
tl;dr: First person is complete horseshit unless it's done really well, and that's really hard, so...yeah, usually horseshit. And Birds is cool. ;P