“because first person pov killed my grandma, ok?” - tumblr users
most work is written in a mixture of first and third person, alternating
including the above quote: “(first person killed) (my) (grandma)”
i think it would be a bizarre linguistic puzzle to try and write a work that was all the same one
but it would be easier in third person (you’d just have to avoid having any dialogue at all)
…Ok, all joking aside… I know the question is about what viewpoint the story is told from, not just about the grammatical device
(although that isn’t a perfect description of what it’s about… because third person can switch between different characters’ viewpoints… and a first person narrator can tell a story mostly in third person about observing other characters, with very little actual use of first person grammar… and almost any first-person narrative could be changed to third person without any change in the actual portrayal of the viewpoint).
…To me it doesn’t matter.
And I find it really baffling when people say they don’t like first person because they “don’t want to imagine themselves there”
Maybe some of them are mixing up the terms “first person” and “second person”? (The second person, “you,” would be the one that implies the reader is there. The first person, “I,” is the narrator, not the reader.)
Or, maybe some of them think that a narrator using the words “I” and “me” just… somehow feels more as if the reader is there?
Which isn’t how it feels to me. You’re clearly not… at most it’s like you’re reading the narrator’s diary after the fact. And in most books, even that framing device wouldn’t make any sense. It’s not supposed to imply anything about the reader and how they’re getting the story, usually. Not any more than third person does.
I guess if I had to state a preference, I like first person a bit better, because it’s a little bit easier to suspend disbelief (this is theoretically a story that a person could tell you about something that actually happened to them, although they probably wouldn’t tell it exactly like that in real life)
Whereas third person requires constant suspension of disbelief about how the story is being recorded. Especially if it shifts between perspectives that couldn’t actually know anything about each other.
But this isn’t a strong preference. Both are common enough that I’ve had my whole life to get used to reading them. And anyway, suspension of disbelief doesn’t actually make much difference to my enjoyment of a story.
I like unusual approaches to POV, actually. One of the most intriguing is when a story is told in the first person plural (“we”) but never the first person singular (“I.”) Once I read a book that was told that way because it was a true story co-authored by two siblings about their childhood home. The children in the family as a group were first-person “we,” but every individual child was referred to in the third person as “he” or “she.” It was fascinating.