Somebody Once Told Me

 

Are stories narrated better in first or third person? In my brief time playing computer games, I could never stand first-person shooters. The only perspective that made sense to me was third-person. I had to be able to see the playable character as if he too were removed from my agency. I think in a story, first-person narration is more honest about the reliability of the person telling you the story. When you read something where the pronoun ‘I’ features a lot, you are conditioned to imagine the narrator might be wrong about a few things. A third-person narrators carries a veneer of objectivity that is not necessarily borne out in the way the story is read. The story is still told from the partisan view of the person deliberately choosing to share it. By externalizing their own person from it, they supply a level of ostensible disengagement that is supposed to make us trust them more. It is not unlike a news headline that clearly wants you to read it one way while not wanting to be responsible for your interpretation.

I find this device to be quite useful in daily life. When you narrate a story, embellishment has value in the qualities it reflects on you as storyteller. Independent of this, however, I think we have the agency to engineer a story towards a desired reaction. Sometimes when I come up with an idea, I share it as if it were passed down to me by a person whose advice carries value. I am convinced this lends it a credence that simply giving advice would not. I have, on more than one occasion, invented sayings that I attributed to a grandparent, teacher or someone of similar stature. The idea that someone external to the situation and universally recognised as a possessing a measure of moral authority was the originator of the thought I am sharing makes people take it more seriously. So I find myself sharing my own thoughts in third-person. There is a measure of dishonesty in it, but it makes for good conversation. Talking feels like the most dishonest way for us to speak to each other, except for all the other ways.