Singular narrative voices

The large number of novels written in the first person would suggest it’s an easy voice to pull off: that the closeness of ‘I’ to ‘me’ means it can be accessed by the novelist without much difficulty. But in fact, the writer must come up with a legitimate reason for why a character is giving a first-hand account of their experience. For fiction to thoroughly convince the illusion needs to be seamless — and if for a second the reader is jolted out of the narrative by wondering why this person suddenly decided to tell me this story, then the author has failed.

It is a voice that must justify its own existence. Why else are so many first-person narrators writers themselves? Why do authors so often use the epistolary or diary form to convey the first person? Occasionally, a writer locates an ‘I’ so unique and distinctive that it is the only way that the story can be told.