The first person plural point of view is relatively uncommon in fiction, so hurrah for Chuffed Buff Books for inviting submissions with a group narrator for their latest short story anthology. But does it work? Well, as I’m one of the five ‘bits of we’ in the collection I must think so, but not everyone may agree.
I wrote A House for the Wazungu from the perspective of the inhabitants of a close-knit community asked to host visitors from abroad. Although a couple of villagers are identified by name – the schoolmaster, Albert Lumumba, and Miriam Moto, the owner of the chai stall – I wanted to conjure a place where individual identities are subsumed within the collective, a culture that values interdependence, as in rural communities of the Global South. The inhabitants of my fictional Kanini would be too busy surviving to concern themselves with such indulgences as communing with their true selves.
A novel written exclusively in the first person plural is The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides. Here the narrators are a group of men who, as teenagers, were obsessed with the Lisbon sisters, all of whom committed suicide. Although several of the boys are mentioned by name, it’s never clear who is speaking, so that the narrative unfolds as if chanted by a Greek chorus. Given that adolescents, despite the undoubted self-obsession, are strongly under the sway of peer-group norms, this is the ideal form for this particular novel. Similarly, I used the first person plural in my short story, Kinky Norm, about a bunch of teenage girls rounding on a teacher. Although it starts with an adult ‘I’ looking back on her childhood, she soon takes refuge in the group ‘we’ where no individual is responsible for what occurs:
A novel written exclusively in the first person plural is The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides. Here the narrators are a group of men who, as teenagers, were obsessed with the Lisbon sisters, all of whom committed suicide. Although several of the boys are mentioned by name, it’s never clear who is speaking, so that the narrative unfolds as if chanted by a Greek chorus. Given that adolescents, despite the undoubted self-obsession, are strongly under the sway of peer-group norms, this is the ideal form for this particular novel. Similarly, I used the first person plural in my short story, Kinky Norm, about a bunch of teenage girls rounding on a teacher. Although it starts with an adult ‘I’ looking back on her childhood, she soon takes refuge in the group ‘we’ where no individual is responsible for what occurs:
We didn’t sit down together and discuss what we were going to do. There was no plan. No ringleader. It just happened: one of those spontaneous eruptions of adolescent exuberance that our schoolmaster had dedicated his career to nurturing.
While the collective can provide its members with a much-needed sense of community and support, it can also stifle individuality and the development of a robust sense of self. Rowan, the stumbling narrator of Ewan Morrison’s prize-winning novel, Close Your Eyes is a case in point:
Even saying I. I still find it hard. It has always felt not like a thing in itself but something left after a We has been broken (p84).
Brought up in a commune and losing her mother before her teens, her psychology is not vastly different from that of the imagined citizens of North Korea in Adam Johnson’s wonderfully chilling novel, The Orphan Master’s Son. Here the first person plural is used equally self-consciously by one of the narrators of the second half of the novel, an interrogator/torturer who longs to discover his unique and separate self. Although he is eventually able to relate events from his own unique point of view, he never goes as far as revealing his name.
In foregrounding the complexity of the use of personal pronouns, these novels highlight one of the dilemmas of the human condition: how to balance our individual needs with our social needs. And perhaps it’s no coincidence, given that so many writers are introverts, that there were three times as many second-person stories than third-person plural in this collection. I’ll be coming back to the ‘you’ stories in another post.
Finally, it’s interesting to note that, although unusual in literature, the first person plural is extremely common in song. Which suits me fine as, while I’m generally an individual on the page, when it comes to music-making I’m always a choral girl.
What about you?
And, incidentally, if you've been to the site before you'll have noticed the revamp from burgundy to grey. I'm hoping the wider screen layout is easier to read. Your feedback welcome.
In foregrounding the complexity of the use of personal pronouns, these novels highlight one of the dilemmas of the human condition: how to balance our individual needs with our social needs. And perhaps it’s no coincidence, given that so many writers are introverts, that there were three times as many second-person stories than third-person plural in this collection. I’ll be coming back to the ‘you’ stories in another post.
Finally, it’s interesting to note that, although unusual in literature, the first person plural is extremely common in song. Which suits me fine as, while I’m generally an individual on the page, when it comes to music-making I’m always a choral girl.
What about you?
And, incidentally, if you've been to the site before you'll have noticed the revamp from burgundy to grey. I'm hoping the wider screen layout is easier to read. Your feedback welcome.
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