Voice and perspective
English · Key Stage 3 · The School
Who is telling this?
First person ("I ran") locks you inside one head: intimate, but limited — you only know what the narrator knows. Third person ("She ran") stands outside: it can be limited to one character or omniscient, moving anywhere. The choice decides what the reader is ALLOWED to know.
Narrators can be wrong
An unreliable narrator misreads events, hides things, or lies. Clues: their account contradicts what other characters do; their explanations flatter themselves; small details do not add up. Spotting unreliability turns reading into detective work — the writer planted every clue.
Perspective as a lens
Rewrite any scene from another character's view and different details matter, different judgements form. Writers exploit this: choosing the bully's perspective, or the bystander's, is itself a statement about whose experience counts.
One event, three tellings
A boy takes a coat from a cloakroom. First person, the boy: "It was freezing, and the coat had been hanging there for a week." You are inside his reasoning, so you are half-persuaded before you have judged anything — that is what first person costs you. Third person limited, the owner: "She came back at four and the peg was empty." You feel the loss and know nothing of the cold. Third person omniscient: both, plus the fact that the coat was about to be thrown away — which neither character knows, and which changes the whole event. Writing about this in an essay, the useful sentence is never "the writer uses first person"; it is "the writer confines us to the boy, so we are given his reasons before we are given the theft."