Which First and How

The quality and quantity, angle and depth of the first person voice can aggregate and disperse large amounts of material for the work of the novel. Through aggregation the character provides reflection on all taken in and shows how their clock and grinder work in relation to dramatic action. In dispersal we gain a rapid conversational flow of informational narrative from a voice most recognizable to the ear. Their quickness and slowness in gathering and consuming alert the reader to the intelligence and soul of the character. The critic's preference leaned on the side of this depth for the first person from distinctly well-trained novelists; Dickens, Richardson, Faulkner, Morrison. When a less tenured novelist employed the first it seemed the tricks, bells and whistles stood out and bewildered, rang, and shrilly whistled a novel's tunes. He enjoyed most, from the beginner, a third person angle of attack, which provided a transparent view of the author's sentence writing abilities and range of categorical thought, or the ability of the author to restrict in a responsible way in order to allow the reader their creativity. In the sentence of the third person the author must become calculating and musical, chopping here and singing there; where short sentences must pack their verbs in tight, a long sentence can build a scaffolding of identity and thought process. We respect the absolute song of the third as a completely cultivated essence. Lawrence and Munro, he thought, could flex such muscles in the sentence. Convinced of the first's power in speed and breathlessness, the critic found the third to be a/the bulldozer; digging deep into the heart of Eliot's objective correlative and pulling and tugging until the heart bounds its normal pace and blunders about in the ether, floundering the reader's head in the heavens and leaving them wanting more and even wanting to re-read for pleasure, for what they captured lead them sure, but what they may have missed required the slow read to see the heavens, or the re-read to envision hell.