The self-absorbed narrator:
The naive narrator
The crazy narrator
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- Think about a selfish person that you know
- Think about a time that this person could not see the big picture of a situation, because they were only thinking about what they wanted.
- Was this situation comical? -- You could use this person as inspiration for an unreliable narrator and write a comedy around it. But, by all means, change names, and don't write about the same exact situation. Use the personality trait and real situation, as inspiration for a fictional story!
- Get into this character's shoes and write a story with "tunnel vision."
- The setting and other characters can give the reader clues as to what the "big picture" is, but the narrator never gets out of his or her own expectations and desires.
- For ideas on how this works, watch the movie Clueless (PG-13) and think about how the film maker made this work. The main character has an epiphany at the end of the movie, not just about the world she lives in, but about her own feelings! This is a good example of a somewhat self-absorbed character showing us the world, but is also a likeable character -- allowing us to see the world as comical.
- How could you create a character like the one in Clueless to tell us a short story?
The naive narrator
- You can create a story with limited knowledge, by having the narrator be a naive character in a story. These work great, because sometimes the character is reliable, at least if the character is virtuous. However, you (the writer) can withhold certain things in a story from the reader, because the narrator is naive. A classic way to do this is tell the story from the perspective of an innocent child (like Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird). Or from the perspective of someone who is mentally challenged (like Benjy from The Sound and The Fury).
The crazy narrator
- Think about Edgar Allen Poe's "The Tell Tale Heart." This narrator may be mentally ill, but in this portion of the website, we are using the "street" definition of "crazy;" that is, this is a narrator that is a loose canon, creepy, or scary. In other words, his level of virtue is skewed and his ability to tell the difference between right and wrong seem to be severely compromised. Some might argue that he does know the difference between right and wrong, but that he is simply evil. This kind of narration can be seen in some of Poe's other short works, like "The Cask of Amontillado."
- Writing Prompt: Think about a person you know, or a character you have seen in a movie or in a written story (prose) that you can model a narrator after.
- Tell us a story and use this kind of narrator to tell it.
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