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Discourse structure of 1st and 3rd person novels
The discourse architecture of 3rd-person narration
1st-person narrators (or I-narrators as they are also called) are narrators
who tell their own tale, and so use the 1st-person pronoun when referring
to themselves. But there is another very common form of narration where
all the characters are referred to in the 3rd person and collapsing cannot
therefore take place on the left-hand side between the bottom two levels
of the discourse structure diagram. These narrations will seem much more
'objective' than 1st-person narrations because they are not automatically
attached to the viewpoint of a particular character. Indeed, with 3rd-person
narrators there is a strong tendency for readers to collapse together
levels 1 and 2 on the left-hand side of the discourse structure diagram
and assume that the narrator and the author are really the same person.
This leads to the idea that 3rd-person narrators are omniscient. They
know everything and can take us inside the mind of any character if they
so wish. In other words, by and large, 3rd-person narrators (= authors)
know everything and tell the truth, whereas 1st-person narrators (= characters)
are notoriously unreliable. The '3rd-person narrator = author' equation
appears to be a default reading assumption. But beware: there are some
well-known cases where the assumption does not hold. Not all authors invent
narrators whose views and attitudes they share!
Even with a 3rd-person narration, it is possible for the narrator to
take up a viewpoint that coincides with that of a particular character
or characters. Indeed, one if its strengths is that it is possible to
adopt the viewpoint of more than one character at different points in
a story, whereas the choice of a 1st-person narrator aligns us with that
particular narrator-character throughout.
Given that the English pronoun system has 3 persons, 1st, 2nd and 3rd,
logically, it should also be possible to have 2nd-person narrators. And
indeed there have been a few 2nd-person narration novels in the last decade
of the 20th century. An example would be 'Half Asleep in Frog Pyjamas'
by the 'hippy' author Tom Robbins  .
But you'll be pleased to know we won't go into 2nd-person narrators on
this course as they are pretty untypical so far at least. Instead, we
will let you have a look at a Tom Robbins website for fun (you'll find
a link to it in Robbin's "author detail" page), and finish with
a final exercise.
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