About: The All-Concealing "I"   Sponge Permalink

An Entity of Type : owl:Thing, within Data Space : 134.155.108.49:8890 associated with source dataset(s)

First-person narration has something of a dual nature. On the one hand, it carries an inherently tight coupling to the protagonist. As such, it's a great way to really get inside their head, showing the reader exactly what they're thinking and why. On the other hand, the structure of English grammar also makes it easy to use a first-person narrative to avoid mentioning basic facts about the narrator. These facts may include the gender, the name, and even the very identity of the narrator. This is a frequent way to achieve a Tomato Surprise. See also Featureless Protagonist.

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  • The All-Concealing "I"
rdfs:comment
  • First-person narration has something of a dual nature. On the one hand, it carries an inherently tight coupling to the protagonist. As such, it's a great way to really get inside their head, showing the reader exactly what they're thinking and why. On the other hand, the structure of English grammar also makes it easy to use a first-person narrative to avoid mentioning basic facts about the narrator. These facts may include the gender, the name, and even the very identity of the narrator. This is a frequent way to achieve a Tomato Surprise. See also Featureless Protagonist.
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dbkwik:all-the-tro...iPageUsesTemplate
dbkwik:allthetrope...iPageUsesTemplate
abstract
  • First-person narration has something of a dual nature. On the one hand, it carries an inherently tight coupling to the protagonist. As such, it's a great way to really get inside their head, showing the reader exactly what they're thinking and why. On the other hand, the structure of English grammar also makes it easy to use a first-person narrative to avoid mentioning basic facts about the narrator. These facts may include the gender, the name, and even the very identity of the narrator. This is a frequent way to achieve a Tomato Surprise. The extent to which this is possible or necessary is very language-specific, especially when the datum to be concealed is a gender. For example, Japanese generally has separate male and female first-person pronouns, so Gender Neutral Writing isn't much easier in the first person than in the third person. In fact, because people outside of family and friends are often referred to by last name alone, it can be easier to surprise the reader about the gender of a third person than it would be to surprise the reader about the gender of the narrator. Similarly, many languages (notably both Romance and Slavic languages) have enough grammatical gender markers other than pronouns that this trope becomes a practical if not a definitional impossibility. Conversely, a number of languages lack gender in the third person, permitting gender-neutral writing without resorting to first person. In principle, you could accomplish the same thing using Second Person Narration, although you don't see that done very often. See also Featureless Protagonist. Examples of The All-Concealing "I" include:
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