Examples of First Person Narrator

First Person Narrator

The storyteller It is the entity or character that relates the events that occur throughout a story. It is the link between the action described and the readers.

Depending on the voice you use and the degree of involvement with the story, there are three types of narrators: the first-person narrator; the second person narrator and the third person narrator.

The narrator may or may not be a character in the story and it is through his story and the angle from the one who looks at the facts that the reader interprets and perceives the events that make up the story.

The first-person narrator is embedded in the story: he narrates the events from the perspective of the protagonist or one of the characters that are part of the story. He is part of the imaginary world of storytelling. For example: I made coffee, with the few beans left at the bottom of the can, took my pen, and got to work.

This type of narrator gives an experiential and realistic tone to the story because it is assumed that he was at the scene. In addition, the first person gives the reader more information about the character, regardless of whether or not he is the protagonist of the story.

Types of first person narrators

Who tells the story is not its protagonist, but a character who was present and witnessed the main events that make up the story.

This narrator does not know the thoughts of the protagonist but, through the story and descriptions of him, the reader can know the evolution of the story. Depending on the story, the tone of the witness narrator can be personal or impersonal.

Examples of works written with a witness narrator:

• The good fortune of the tenant of the veilby Arthur Conan Doyle.
• The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The narrator tells his own story, from his point of view. For this, he uses the first and the third person. Throughout his narration, he captures his memories, sensations, thoughts and feelings. Unlike other narrators, the protagonist never knows what the rest of the characters think. It is, perhaps, the type of narrator most used for its simplicity and because it is more intuitive.

Examples of works written with the main narrator:

• Gulliver's Journey to Lilliputby Jonathan Swift.
• The last customer of the nightby Marguerite Duras.
• Lolitaby Vladimir Nabokov.

He is perhaps the least used type of storyteller in literature. It consists of literally describing the thinking of a character, so that his narration is not intended for anyone but himself.

Also known as an interior monologue, this narrator seeks to capture the character's thinking in real time. Therefore, it is characterized by being a chaotic sequence of reflections, fantasies, ideas, sensations and emotions of the narrator. When the author appeals to this type of narrator, he usually does not respect the rules of syntax and punctuation, to give the story greater truthfulness.

Examples of works written with a narrator in flow of thoughts:

• The noise and the furyby William Faulkner.
• The life is dream, by Pedro Calderón de la Barca when we have the information.

Examples of first person narrators

1. Main narrator

He had several things to resolve that day. And I knew that work would not be one of my priorities. The forms that you had to fill out if you wanted to leave that country that had lost its way years ago were crowded on the table, which for months he had not even used to support a cup of coffee because of how crowded it he was.

I still had several boxes full of books that I had to locate at my parents' house before the owner of that succucho that I rented forced me to abandon it. And I hadn't even said goodbye to my friends, or to the people whose faces I knew I was going to miss once I set foot in who knows what Eastern European country.

I picked up the phone, and without thinking, I called Nestor, and asked him to have a medical certificate ready for me to excuse me from going to work for at least the next three days. I made coffee, with the few beans left at the bottom of the can, took my pen, and got to work.

1. Witness narrator

Suddenly, he opened the wooden door that separated that dump from the outside world, which made the heads of more than one diner turn; he left his brown coat on a chair; lit a cigar; He asked for something to eat and dived between the pages of a diary that, surely, had been on that table full of crumbs for several days and who knows what.

After a while, the man I later learned would be the detective he had hired to entrust him with the difficult task of finding out who was the man who had scammed him weeks ago. The conversation lasted only a few minutes, and when the waiter brought his order, the detective had already put on his gray hat, and he kept in his pilot's left pocket the ramshackle notebook in which he had taken some notes.

At no time did he see me sitting at the back of the canteen where he used to have lunch every noon, to flee, at least for a while, from the black hole he used to call "office."

1. Narrator in stream of thoughts

Don't you get tired of always telling the same anecdote? Don't you realize that nobody cares and that it's not even funny? That nobody even fakes a smile like before, when we still hadn't completely lost our respect for him?

The worst of all is that this mediocre is the boss, he is the one who earns more money than all of us put together and the direction of this company depends on him, which has long lost it. And that he doesn't even care. He doesn't even know. He continues to play the businessman with his secretary and his chauffeur while we all go under.

He who knows, knows and he who does not, is the boss, my father used to say. I never thought that cliché and that I listened to exhaustion could be so true until I set foot in this place. Damn the day I signed that contract that ties me to this circus that some still call company.

Please God, let that phone ring, that one of the many resumes that I sent has been useful for something and that this place, in a few months, will be nothing more than a gray memory.

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