First-Person Narration
First-person narration occurs when the narrator of a story is also a participant of the story. A first-person narrative may be either autodiegetic,
in which the narrator is also the protagonist of the story, or homodiegetic, in which the narrator is a minor character and therefore simply a witness to the experiences of the protagonist. In Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, for instance, we find an autodiegetic narrator, as the novel's eponymous hero is also its narrator. Here, an older Crusoe, the "narrating I" of the story, tells of the adventures of his younger self, the "experiencing I" of the narrative: "I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a good Family" (47). Aphra Behn's Oroonoko offers an example of a homodiegetic narrator, as Behn depicts herself as a minor character in the narrative and, therefore, as one privy to its major events: "I was my self an Eye-Witness to a great part, of what you will find here set down; and what I cou'd not be Witness of, I receiv'd from the Mouth of the chief Actor in this History, the Hero himself" (8). |