Prose craft
First-person narration
A mode of storytelling in which the storyteller recounts events from their own point of view, narrating as a character inside the story.
First-person narrative is the mode of storytelling "in which a storyteller recounts events from that storyteller's own personal point of view," using first-person grammar such as "I", "me" and "my", with the plurals "we" and "us". The narrator must be a character within the story, whether the protagonist or focal character, a re-teller or witness, or a peripheral figure on the edge of the events. The article names Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) "the classic example of first-person narrative," and Moby-Dick's "Call me Ishmael" shows the grammar at its most famous.
The mode's advantage is interiority: the reader receives the narrator's inner view of the fictional universe. Its cost is confinement: the narrator knows only what they have experienced and observed, an inherently imperfect witness, and where bias or dishonesty enters, the mode shades into the unreliable narrator. It is one of the standard point of view choices; the trade-offs are weighed in choosing point of view.