First Person ("I") Narration


I’d never given much thought to books written in the first person (“I”). It just felt like one of many styles in which a book could be written. Even when the murderer in Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd turned out to be the narrator, it just felt like a nice parlor trick for a whodunit.

Take this awesome book written in the first person, Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Through the book, the narrator describes two versions of himself: the older, slightly crazy one (he names that version Phaedrus) who was eventually institutionalized and lobotomized; and the present one. If you’ve read the book, you know Phaedrus is the one went overboard; and the present day version is the wiser, mature one.

Except, as Pirsig wrote in the preface to the 25 year anniversary edition, the narrator had pulled a Roger Ackroyd on you!
“There is a narrator whose mind you never leave. He refers to an evil ghost named Phaedrus, but the only way you know this ghost is evil is because the narrator tells you so.”
And I didn’t notice this point while reading the book:
“(The narrator) never tells you his story except in ways that are calculated to make you like him.”
The narrator pulls this I-am-the-good-guy effect so well that he can even admit the truth at one point in the book:
“What I am is a heretic who’s recanted, and thereby in everyone’s eyes saved his soul. Everyone’s eyes but one (Phaedrus), who knows deep down inside that all he has saved is his skin.”
Even when I read that confession, guess who I felt sorry for? The narrator. He’d just made the kind of compromise all of us make, I remember thinking.

Hats off to Pirsig! As if writing a philosophical masterpiece wasn’t hard enough, he’d also pulled off a literary trick in the same book as icing on the cake. And I didn’t even realize what he’d pulled off until he explained it in the preface. Bravo!

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