First-person narrative

A first-person narrative is a story from the first-person perspective: the viewpoint of a character writing or speaking directly about themselves. In films, videos, or video games, a first-person perspective may also mean that the narrative is shot or presented as if directly coming from a character's in-body point of view, portraying exactly what the character sees or experiences (for example, in first-person shooter games).

The narrators of written works explicitly refer to themselves using variations of "I" (the first-person singular pronoun) and/or "we" (the first-person plural pronoun), typically as well as other characters. This allows the reader or audience to see the point of view (including opinions, thoughts, and feelings) only of the narrator, and not of other characters. In some stories, first-person narrators may refer to information they have heard from the other characters, in order to try to deliver a larger point of view. Other stories may switch from one narrator to another, allowing the reader or audience to experience the thoughts and feelings of more than one character or character plural.

The telling of a story in the grammatical first person, i.e. from the perspective of "I". An example would be Herman Melville's Moby Dick, which begins "Call me Ishmael".

First-person narration often includes an embedded listener or reader, who serves as the audience for the tale. First-person narrations may be told by a person directly undergoing the events in the story without being aware of conveying that experience to readers; alternatively, the narrator may be conscious of telling the story to a given audience, perhaps at a given place and time, for a given reason.

A story written in the first person can be told by the main character, a less important character witnessing events, or a person retelling a story they were told by someone else. This point of view is often effective in giving a sense of closeness to the character.

First-person narration presents the narrative through the perspective of a particular character. The reader or audience becomes aware of the events and characters of the story through the narrator's views and knowledge. As a participant in events, the conscious narrator, is an imperfect witness by definition, unable to fully see and comprehend events in their entirety as they unfurl, not necessarily objective in their inner thoughts or sharing them fully, and furthermore may be pursuing some hidden agenda. In some cases, the narrator may give or withhold information based on his own experience.

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