Incognito First Person POV

[Homer Potvin]

I mentioned this in another thread about the POV in Less by Andrew Sean Greer and forgot to come back to it when I finished the book a while back. In the novel, there is a first person POV but only four or five "I-guy" references in the book until the end. You forget it's there for forty or fifty pages at a time and then a random "I" appears for no reason at all. The net effect is that the book reads as objective POV because we're never able to get inside the head of the protagonist, Arthur Less, who is in every scene. Yet the first person narrator, who is not personified, will offer observational opinions and thoughts about situations and other characters, but not from Arthur Less's perspective, which you would think would play wonky but does not.

I should add that it's a capital L literary novel that won a Pulitzer... one of those books where every bit of prose is so perfectly executed it's almost annoying.

Toward the very end it is revealed that the I-guy narrator is actually one of the recurring characters in the book, yet that character is framed as all the others are. It's like the narrator has been disembodied, is looking down on himself, and talking about himself objectively in the third person. "Incognito" (to even himself) is the only word to describe it. Or maybe "inverted." I've never seen anything like it before but it works perfectly.

I don't really have a question... just wanted to mention how messed up it is. I guess I would ask if anyone has seen anything like before? It would be like Watson narrating Sherlock Holmes but referring to himself as Watson in an objective POV with only an unrelated I-guy reference to remind us there was a first person narrator sitting somewhere, but never clueing us in that it's really Watson.

 

[Naomasa298]

I've seen a fair number of stories with an unnamed protagonist who participates in the scene and narrates in first person, yes. I think Lovecraft does that a lot. But it's not quite the same as what you're describing.

Maybe it's a dissociative, or out-of-body narrator, and kind of self-observer?

 

[Banespawn]

It sounds like 3rd-omni with an intrusive narrator. The conceit, though, seems to be that the narrator is also a character in the story and refer to him/herself in the 3rd person, and you don't find out until the end that the narrator is that character.

I can't say I've read anything exactly like it. The only thing similar that I've read is Tress of the Emerald Sea. It's omniscient with an intrusive, 1st-person narrator who is also a character in the story. The 3rd-person parts feel more like 3rd limited, though, and the narrator reveals early on who he is. IIRC, the narrator as character was referred to in the 3rd-person, but only from the FMC's perspective.

My attempt so far to write something similar has been fun but challenging.

 

[CatrionaGrace]

I read a book where the first person incognito turned out to be either a green or black mamba. Wish I could recall title or author or even the plot, but all I recall is the snake. Bite! Bite! Bite!

 

[Naomasa298]

In the short story, Learning To Be Me, by Greg Egan, the narration is first person. It appears to be by a man who is considering having his organic brain removed, and it being replaced by the "jewel" all people have implanted in their heads as children. This jewel eventually replicates the thought patterns of the person, and once the organic brain is removed, functions as their brain, greatly reducing cases of vaious diseases. As the story progresses, he starts losing control over his body.

He (and the reader) discovers that he is, in fact, the jewel. When the person has their organic brain removed, they will die, and he, the jewel, will remain in control of the body. This is another unreliable narrator, I think, but isn't this whole POV another form of an unreliable narrator?