| abstract
| - Think back to the last time you told someone a story of something that happened to you. Think about how you described it, the language you used, and what parts of the story you emphasized. Chances are you cut to the chase quickly, or at least mentioned only the details important to building up the story, and then you described the events in casual language. You didn't describe it the way a book is written. And yet, virtually every single first-person narrative in existence in pretty much any novel is dramatically-written, spends a lot of time on not just events important to the story, but also ones that build character, or even events not really important at all. Events are described in the same amount of detail that they are in third-person narratives. The narrator often uses a higher and more formal level of English than their own dialog. Basically, as far as structure goes, it's essentially the same as a third-person limited narrative, except it happens to be in first-person. There's several reasons for this. For one, a first-person narrative allows readers to get into the main character's head in a way that a third-person narrative might not. It allows the protagonist to describe things bluntly or colorfully in a way that might look strange coming from a third-person narrator (although not a Lemony Narrator, who specializes in such). It allows for a story that feels more "human", but at the same time, due to this trope, still reads like a novel and contains the same level of excitement. It also allows for a more exciting story. When's the last time you heard someone describe an experience in as much detail as your favorite book? If they did, it would probably be a more exciting story... but also a much longer one. But this way, you get the best of both worlds: a story with the depth of storytelling of a novel, but the humanness of its protagonist infused into the narrative itself. It can stretch plausibility to begin with if you think about it, but more so when the narrator is very young or uneducated, but hey, that's why we have the Literary Agent Hypothesis. Or the MST3K Mantra. This is pretty much one of those Acceptable Breaks From Reality that's so commonplace that we tend not to even notice it. Sometimes this is justified in-story, by having the narrator be specifically writing a book about their own experiences, and sometimes the narrator talks directly to the reader. Generally, though, most books have us read a detailed stream of consciousness, which isn't talking to anyone in particular. Sometimes writers try to avoid having the narrator sound too much like a narrator speaking the King's English, by having them write in an informal, more casual dialect. Even when that's the case, however, there's usually one consistency across pretty much all first-person novels: The events in the story are described in more detail than an ordinary person casually relating a story would likely ever give.
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