We Can Be Heroes Trivia Quiz

Answer:

Authors of fiction employ first-person narration to emphasize personal experience and create a stronger connection with readers. A first-person narrator can be the protagonist of a story or somebody who observes events but also participates in them to some degree. This kind of narration is often unreliable, as it is subjective almost by definition and may be influenced by various factors.

Many first-person narratives are presented as autobiographical accounts, beginning with the main character's birth or early childhood. This is the case of Charles Dickens' partially autobiographical "David Copperfield" (1850) - a traditional "bildungsroman", detailing the titular character's psychological and moral growth from infancy to maturity. Another of Dickens' most popular works, "Great Expectations" (1961), is also fully narrated in the first person.

Anna Sewell's "Black Beauty" (1877) is also presented as an autobiographical memoir, but - most unusually - the narrator is a horse, who relates his life from childhood to a peaceful retirement that follows a series of traumatic events. Sewell used this device to make the story more relatable to human experience and drive home a strong message against cruelty to animals.

Two of the great classic novels of the 18th century, Daniel Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" (1719) and Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" (1726), have first-person narrators who experience various adventures. A journalist as well as an author of fiction, Defoe based his novel on a true story: Robinson narrates the events in detail with a degree of realism that makes them wholly believable. On the other hand, though Lemuel Gulliver's tale is framed as a realistic travel narrative (a popular genre at the time), Swift's masterpiece is satirical in intent, replacing Defoe's optimistic tone with sarcasm and mockery of the weaknesses of human nature and civilization.

Alice Walker's "The Color Purple" (1982) offers a modern take on the epistolary novel. Celie, the protagonist, tells the harrowing events of her life through letters written initially to God, then to her sister Nettie. Celie's final letter, addressed to the world, reflects her sense of wholeness and inner peace achieved through suffering and personal growth.

As its title suggests, the events in Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" (1985) are narrated from the point of view of its protagonist, a woman whose very name - Offred, meaning "belonging to Fred" - points to her completely subservient role in the dystopian society of the Republic of Gilead. Offred's narrative alternates accounts of her present-day life with flashbacks of her past.

Yann Martel's "Life of Pi" (2001) is also a modern example of fictional autobiography with elements of speculative fiction. It is narrated by a 16-year-old boy from India whose recollection of the plot's crucial events requires some suspension of disbelief - not surprising in a novel one of whose main themes is the relativity of truth. In fact, at the end of the novel Pi presents two different versions of his story to the investigators, asking them to choose the one they prefer.

The doomed romance at the core of Ernest Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms" (1929) is narrated by Frederick Henry, an American officer, in a restrained, matter-of-fact tone that leaves much unsaid in terms of feelings and emotions - except at the very end. The story is heavily based on Hemingway's own experiences as an ambulance driver during WWI.

In Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita" (1955) and Daphne du Maurier's "Rebecca" (1938), neither of the titular characters are the narrator or the protagonist of the story. The former novel is framed as a memoir by a former French professor who writes under the pseudonym of Humbert Humbert. A deeply unsympathetic character and unreliable narrator, Humbert addresses the readers as his jury, teasing and shocking them with his clownish, bombastic attitude and unsavoury sexual obsession. "Rebecca" is narrated by an unnamed young woman whose marriage is haunted by the memory of her husband's first wife. The story is presented as a flashback triggered by a dream. The absence of the protagonist's name emphasizes her shyness and insecurity in contrast with Rebecca's beauty and glamour.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" (1925) is an often-cited example of a first-person narrator who is not the novel's protagonist, but rather a witness of the events that unfold in the plot. A naïve young man from the Midwest, Nick Carraway is drawn into his neighbour Jay Gatsby's opulent lifestyle. By the end of the novel, Nick's optimistic nature has been tainted with the bitterness of disillusion - masterfully conveyed by the novel's closing line.

The main body of the narration in Joseph Conrad's novella "Heart of Darkness" (1899) is framed by the observations of an unnamed man, one of four passengers on a boat on the Thames. He introduces the events with a lengthy description of the river at the twilight hour, which eventually triggers Charles Marlow's recollection of his trip to the Belgian Congo into the titular "heart of darkness". Another well-known occurrence of a double first-person narrator can be found in Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights" (1847).

The six wrong choices are all novels narrated in the third person by an omniscient narrator. Though not a character in the book, this kind of narrator has access to the thoughts and feelings of one or multiple characters and often knows details of the story that they ignore.