What are the advantages and disadvantages of writing in first person?

Question

A lot of people are either on the side of first person or the side of third person. But what are the advantages and disadvantages of writing in first person for fiction?

Answer 1

Advantages

• First person narratives also have a much easier time garnering empathy from your audience, since they end up spending so much time in your character's brain.
• If done well, it can give logic and motivations to characters that would seem otherwise evil, immoral, or otherwise not relatable.
• It more easily fleshes a character on the page by allowing the audience to listen to their voice for long periods of time.
• A beginning writer often finds it easier to keep consistent tone, style, and prose when writing in first person.
• In some ways, a first person narrator can more easily "dump" information on the reader.

Disadvantages

• Many authors discount this, but I think it's important: the narrator needs to have a clear reason to be telling or documenting the story in the first place.
• Describing the protagonist clearly (let alone honestly and objectively) is very difficult, and usually requires tacky tricks (like staring into a mirror).
• Perspective and perceptions are extremely limited.
• First person narrators, unless they are telling the story far in the future, are less inclined to understand the gravity of any situation. In general they are more grounded in the immediacy of any given moment and less able to see its place in the grand scope of things.

Answer 2

First person makes it easy to show a character's motivations, and using it with an unreliable narrator can add a nice twist of ambiguity. With highly sympathetic narrators, it can forge a strong connection between reader and protagonist.

On the other hand: (Most of this assumes the point point-of-view character is the protagonist, which is the option I've seen most often.) The reader can't witness any action that the protagonist doesn't. It's more challenging to describe the point-of-view character (both physically and otherwise). The reader doesn't get the benefit of multiple perspectives on the same events. It tends to distance the reader a bit from the other characters.

"Disadvantages" might not be the best word, because some or all of them can be advantages in certain types of stories. For instance, suspense might hinge almost entirely on the reader's only being privy to a limited view of events.

I would say that, generally, first-person works best with a point-of-view character who is either extremely identifiable (reader feels at home in the character's head) or not identifiable at all (reader needs an especially deep insight into the character's motivations).

Answer 3

I would like to highlight an advantage that first person gives when writing a text: the emotional edge in describing lists, enumerations and so on. Things are rendered as integral to your personal memories: you could easily build a crescendo where otherwise a detached description would induce other emotions in the reader.

It is a common trick for rhetorical speeches (i.e. preachers, politicians), but some splendid examples belong fully to literature. One example in contemporary literature is 'Je me Souviens' by Georges Perec