I’ve read some books; you’ve read some books. You, like me, have noticed that some books use ‘he’ for the protagonist and some use ‘I’. If you’re truly adventurous, you may even have encountered the dread ‘you’ protagonist. Thus far, it’s all simple enough, but like everything in writing (including spelling), there’s a whole layer of thought and consideration under these choices, a set of trade-offs and ideas that we, as writers, would do well to be aware of. What does ‘third person near’ mean? What about ‘third person omniscient’? Are there different shades of first person, of second? The answer to that one, much to the benefit of this article’s length, is ‘yes’. What, generally speaking, are the advantages and disadvantages of each type of perspective? We’ll go over both of those for four types of perspectives (first person, second person, third person, and narrator), as well as outlining the general subcategories and qualifiers of these types.

First Person

First person perspectives have significant advantages, though they can all be strengthened or mitigated by the individual author’s particular use of them. This perspective type grants an immediacy and connection to the character that third person often struggles with, without the difficult and often disturbing unconventionality of second person. This nearness arises in part by mimicking how we think of ourselves, delivering the story straight to us by having us look out through the character’s eyes and hear through his ears and read out his thoughts. It gives us an up-close on his internal monologue with a naturalness few other perspectives can emulate.

These advantages, however, are not the whole story. First person is a limiting perspective. If the character doesn’t know it, the story can’t know it. For example, if Bob Spuart is unaware of his wife’s recent spending spree at the dress shop, the story can’t mention the fact of that spending spree- at least not until Spuart is informed of the fact, whether by his wife or by a check-up on his bank account. This downside could be remedied in part by switching perspectives between different persons, but first person can make this a difficult process, confusing for the reader, particularly if he’s away from the book for those few minutes required to make him forget precisely which character he’s partway through reading the perspective of. The difficulty of organically incorporating a first person character’s name into the story (to inform the reader of it) is also worth noting here, though whether it’s downside or upside depends. Finally, sometimes the first person’s benefit- naturalistic internal monologue- isn’t a benefit to your story or isn’t something you’re stylistically interested in.

First person comes in two variants and with two qualifiers. ‘First person near’ is the bog standard for first person, and for a reason; this variant takes full advantage of first person to deliver the perspective character’s thoughts and feelings straight to the reader. First person far, by contrast, is the inverse, first person which does not get inside the character’s head, instead describing their actions from their perspective without their thoughts- a blurry line, of course, as it’s still their perspective on their actions. As for the qualifiers, first person can ‘switch’ (‘first person switching’, you might call it) between different viewpoint characters, giving first one and then another the coveted role of ‘I’. As noted above, this is tricky (and to my knowledge rare- among the problems it encounters is the potential to smear the character into each other in the reader’s mind) but doable. The second qualifier is that the first person perspective doesn’t have to be the protagonist. Of course, once the perspective consistently leaves the protagonist, while still treating him or her as the protagonist, we’re dealing more with what I’ll describe as a narrator-internal than a standard first person.

Second Person

Second person is the odd duck on this list. It’s the least popular by far and consequently the weirdest. It has advantages, to be sure. Second person does not mimic how we think of ourselves; instead, it mimics how others speak to us, calling us not to read a story from another’s perspective but to read a history of ourselves, even if it is purest fiction. In point of fact, I would argue that second person, well done, is the most immediate of the three, placing the reader directly into the situation as themselves, rather than wearing somebody else’s body and mind as in first person. Second person, in skilled hands, can enthrall you; I remember quite vividly reading a story written in second person¹, being called by the necessity of real life, and experiencing a moment of disorientation as I had to force my mind to recognize that I was not, in fact, in the situation the story described, that I was sitting at my desk in my home with dinner just finished preparing. Second person also has some fringe or potential benefits: it’s useful for informal non-fiction² (as you may have noticed), and it synergizes well with present tense³.

If second person has all those advantages, why doesn’t everybody use it? The most intuitive answer is that it’s really weird. Most people don’t use it for stories, so most people don’t use it for stories. It’s unnatural, in a sense, to tell a story in second person; instead of telling of something that happened to you personally (first person) or to somebody else (third person), you’re telling the story of something that happened to the person you’re talking to. Outside of certain situations- parents trying to get their kids to recognize the error of their ways and similar rhetorical illustrations- we don’t naturally tell stories in second person. As a result of this unconventionality and unnaturalness, second person is tiring not only to write but to read. In order to do either, after all, you have to stretch your mind in a direction it’s not used to.

Second person also has the disadvantage of being very hard to do well and very unforgiving of anything less than top notch execution. Second person stories have to convince their readers not that the character would do such-and-such but that they themselves, the reader (or the version of the reader who is being the protagonist), would do such-and-such. Fail, get the reader to say ‘but I wouldn’t do that!’, and the whole thing comes tumbling down, the pretense breaks, and the story flops. Furthermore, when it’s well executed, second person can produce, as noted above, a certain disorientation in transitioning between it and primary creation, between the story and real life. Many people simply won’t enjoy that, will be averse to submitting themselves to it, or may simply find the extreme immediacy of the well written second person story, in which you are the protagonist not at a remove but directly, exhausting and unenjoyable. Well written second person, too, will have problems with its ‘you’ character; it has much less room for distinctive characterization, must put in much more effort into each part, because, again, it’s not convincing you that a person could be this way, it’s convincing you that you are this way.

Aside from these more unique downsides, second person has the same problems as first person: it’s limiting, with even less capacity to switch between perspective characters, and if you don’t particularly want the benefits it provides, they can actually be downsides. Overall, second person is the most difficult of the four categories under inspection today.

That out of the way, second person has much the same categories as first person⁴. Near gets into ‘your’ head; ‘far’ doesn’t. ‘Switching’ puts you in other people’s existences- very difficult, as I’m sure you’ll realize.

Third Person

Third person, as a category, is the most flexible of the four, particularly since the narrator perspectives are more properly subcategories of this (or blends with first person). It has the unique capacity, among the three ‘person’ options, to mimic how we think of others and how we perceive other people’s stories, because that’s exactly what it is (how we think of others people’s stories). Moreover, depending on your chosen variant, third person can achieve much of the immediacy of first person (with some work). It can leave the limited perspectives of the other two, soar uninhibited between character’s minds and across fields of knowledge no character in the world actually has. It all depends on which type of third person you choose- which is why I’ll be giving a brief advantage-disadvantage breakdown with each variant, rather than one for the whole type.

‘Third person far’ treats the characters from the outside. Depending on your desire, it may treat them only with the knowledge possess by the characters or with all the omniscience an author can possess, but it never gets their thoughts or feelings directly, contenting itself with describing the results of those thoughts and feelings.

‘Third person near’ gets into the head of a single⁵ character at a time (switching is permissible and fairly common- I do it, for instance), but from third person. It can treat thoughts by relaying them from the outside- ‘Brian thought that Susan was quite pretty’-, describing their results- ‘Brian’s eyes widened as they alighted on Susan’s face’-, or by treating them as dialogue- ‘Susan is quite pretty, thought Brian⁶.’ It is, however, a limited perspective. However often you switch your viewpoint character, you are always limited to one at a time.

Third person omniscient⁷ is the apotheosis of third person. In this perspective, no information is off limits, no thoughts, no events, no happenings. The only restraint is what the author desires to show at that time, what the constraint of art and beauty demands. Thoughts can be relayed, described by their results, or made into faux dialogue as the author desires, no matter the character they originate from. No viewpoint character exists, though focal points will exist. This doesn’t mean you tell everything. One great danger of this is that the freedom might lead to undue indulgence. The author must constrain himself from using every bit of his freedom, must choose which facts and which types of facts he wishes to declare, how he wishes to declare them. Examples of third person omniscient include Les Miserables and many older novels (by Dickens, for instance) which are willing to declare willy-nilly the thoughts of any person who wanders on-scene⁸.

Narrator

Narrator is best conceived as an extension of the third person perspective, though it sometimes uses first person as if it were third person near. A narrator is a simple concept enough- a person or personality (whether the author’s, that assumed by the author as a facsimile of himself, or that of a character) which relates the story to the reader. Sometimes they’re more subtle- Narnia, for instance- and sometimes they’re more intrusive-the Princess Bride novel. Sometimes they can melt so far into the background as to be essentially just a slight variation on a standard perspective.

They do have some common advantages and disadvantages.  Narrators can provide character and tone to the narrative, illuminating themes or salient elements, as does Goldman’s in The Princess Bride, particularly the book version. They can also provide a naturalistic information filter, explaining within the story’s bounds the different bits of information that show up or don’t. You can also create unreliable narrators (though that trope includes first and third person near portrayals as well, provided they’re deceptive) who filter the narrative through their own agenda. On the other hand, narrators add a layer of abstraction to the story. For the writer, they add an extra element that may or may not be worth the effort, an extra character to juggle, an extra part to coordinate the tone with. For the reader, the same problem exists, except in memory rather than generation. Very often, it may be more effective to let the narrator fade into the background, lose all distinction as a being internal to the art, become merely another word for the author sitting at the table scratching away at the paper or tap-tap-tapping on the keyboard.

Narrators come in all sorts and sizes; in truth, they’re a topic unto themselves. Recorder narrators are conceits for the story’s creation, backstories for the authorship internal to the world. In this sense, Bilbo and Frodo play narrator via the Red Book of Westmarch [check] for The Lord of the Rings. A more conventional example is C.S. Lewis’s role in his Space Trilogy, particularly the first two books, wherein he is explicitly a friend of the protagonist taking down a record of his adventures, a chronicler. Another variant is when a character is recording his own adventures, with the story being in its own conceit the memoirs or work of its characters (singular or plural).

Narrators can be characters within the world in other ways too. They can be character peripheral to the events of the story- The Great Gatsby does this- or characters actually significant to the plot (though at some point this will just cross over into third person near or first person, depending on the grammar). You may even have multiple internal narrators (or multiple external-to-the-world narrators, though I’ve never seen this).

Narrators exterior to the world of the story, who exist either as a conceit of the story’s form or as fictionalized versions of the author, narrators who recognize the narrative they tell (but not, usually, themselves) as fictional or as exterior to themselves (if not necessarily fictional, perhaps treating it as legendary or history-of-far-off) have a peculiar quality. They can leave behind the constraints the third person or first person near perspectives of most internal-to-the-world narrators. They can possess omniscience, or they can have knowledge strictly delineated, knowing thoughts but not what the characters do not know or knowing everything physical (even when they do not tell it) but having not a clue as to thoughts. They do here have one significant difference from the plain third person omniscient here, though whether an advantage or disadvantage depends on the story: they can retain explicit personality even when attaining omniscience.⁹

My Opinions & A Final Thought

Now I get to talk about what’s truly interesting to all of you: me. I personally use third person near, with multiple non-simultaneous viewpoint characters (‘switching’), for my stories, though I’ve dabbled in first person near for short stories and poetry (no switching). I’ve grown accustomed to the conventions of that form and find it thoroughly wieldy for my purpose. I am intrigued, however, by second person near (with a dash of present tense), as well as by third person near in present tense (I didn’t discuss tenses, I admit, but I’ve actually used this perspective-tense combination in now-discarded drafts) and in third person omniscient (or using a distinct narrator).

As for my final thought: remember that the advantages I’ve listed out aren’t always advantages. If they help you tell the particular story, they’re advantages. If they don’t, they’re not. Exercise discernment, please, consider carefully what advantages your story, what is irrelevant (and possibly unnecessary effort), and what would be an actual disadvantage. Weigh the costs, the benefits, and the time before you make your decision. Pray a bit; it won’t hurt.

… And come back next week for a look at third person near perspectives.

God bless.

Footnotes

1 – I do not, however, remember the story’s name.

2 – As somebody who has made this error, be careful with second person in nonfiction. It’s all too easy to come off as condescending or arrogant, regardless of your intention, and stuffing it full of caveats is poisoning the guard dog to get rid of the barking.

3 – I’m curious how it would interact with future- probably a lot better than future with first person, where you wonder why the speaker won’t change what he’s narrating he will do.

4 – Except for being in a non-protagonist’s head, as I’m not sure it’s workable. If you manage it, please tell me.

5 – I suppose you could consider perspective with multiple simultaneous viewpoint characters a type of this variant, provided the viewpoint characters were delineated, consistent, and discriminate. Go past two or three, though, and it might as well be a conservative third person omniscient.

6 – I’m following my general convention of using italics to set off thoughts, rather than quotation marks. Also note that the dialogue tag (‘Brian thought’) can be omitted in a similar manner to how normal dialogue tags can be omitted, particularly as only one thought-speaker at a time is possible under this format.

7 – ‘Omniscience’ here meaning ‘an authorial level of knowledge’. For God, as Author of all, this is true omniscience; for us mortal writers, it means only that we decide what is true within the world (to an extent: see here) and can reference back to all our decisions, even the ones that never end up being communicated to the reader (like the stylistic preferences of one protagonist’s culture vis a vis beards).

8 – This subcategory is, in truth, somewhat artificial, being defined properly as ‘any third person perspective not limited to specific characters’. Consider it an open field with a fence on one side, not a guide line.

9 – Implicit personality cannot be avoided, given the personal nature of the author. Even an impersonal AI-generation will result in a facsimile of a personality to the narrator.