Chapters 16, 17 and 18 Summary and Analysis

"First Person Narrative" The author begins his discussion of this narrative perspective by suggesting that the writer/storyteller should avoid overuse of dialect and/or speech habit in defining the voice of his/her narrator. The narrative is, after all, being written from the perspective of what the narrator believes himself to be saying, rather than by what the listener/reader is actually hearing. He goes on to suggest that a limitation of the first person form is that for the form to be entirely effective, the person narrating the story has to be present at the major incidents of the narrative—if a narrator does not describe the specifics of a circumstance or event, there must be clear and valid justification for doing so. The main advantage to first person narration, he suggests, is "to let [the...