In Defense of Third Person

“I think fiction writing which does not acknowledge the uncertainty of the narrator himself is a form of imposture which I find very, very difficult to take. Any form of authorial writing where the narrator sets himself up as stagehand and director and judge and executor in a text, I find somehow unacceptable. I cannot bear to read books of this kind.” – W. G. Sebald

That this is the age of first person seems undeniable.  Essay and memoir are—have been for some time—culturally ascendant, with the lines between fiction and essay increasingly blurred (I’ve written about this here).  In its less exalted form, first person dominates our national discourse in many guises:  the tell-all, the blog post, the reality confessional booth, the carefully curated social media account, the reckless tweets of our demented president.  We are surrounded by a multitude of first person narratives, vying for our time and attention, and we respond to them, in our work, and increasingly in our art, in first person.

My impression, as a writer and teacher, is that over the last 10 or 15 years there has been a paradigmatic move toward first person as the default mode of storytelling.  In a workshop of 20 student pieces, I’m now surprised if more than a third are written in third person.  When I flip open a story collection or literary magazine, my eye expects to settle on a paragraph liberally girded with that little pillar of self.

Anecdotal evidence tends to support this suspicion.  A completely random example:  six of the last 10 National Book Award winners ), the tally is 40 to 15 in favor of third person.  This is, of course, completely anecdotal and almost certainly statistical noise, to a degree.  Still, it’s suggestive.  As recently as 10 years ago, creative nonfiction specialist jobs barely existed at the university and graduate MFA level; last year, there were more creative nonfiction job openings than comparable tenure track positions for poets.  Essay and memoir classes have sprung up everywhere.  Whether this trend is significant and whether it will continue are debatable; that it is a trend, seems less so.