The third person narrator, instead of being omniscient, is like a constantly running surveillance tape.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The third person allows characters to really attack themselves. We all do this - attack ourselves - every hour of our lives.
There's something uniquely exhilarating about puzzling together the truth at the hands of an unreliable narrator.
One of the strategies for doing first-person is to make the narrator very knowing, so that the reader is with somebody who has a take on everything they observe.
I write from this tight third-person viewpoint, where each chapter is seen through the eyes of one individual character. When I'm writing that character, I become that character and identify with that character.
It's also possible to have two third person singular points of view, as represented by two characters through whose eyes the story is told in alternating chapters, say.
When the reader and one narrator know something the other narrator does not, the opportunities for suspense and plot development and the shifting of reader sympathies get really interesting.
Using a first-person narrator is simply a matter of hearing the voice inside yourself.
One of the fun things about unreliable narrators is they can be funny. You can admire things about them and laugh with them.
I think every first-person narrator in a novel should be compromised. I prefer that word to 'unreliable.'
When you pick up a book, everyone knows it's imaginary. You don't have to pretend it's not a book. We don't have to pretend that people don't write books. That omniscient third-person narration isn't the only way to do it. Once you're writing in the first person, then the narrator is a writer.