Some years ago I was poking at a pile of text which was alternating first-person present tense and second-person present tense (it was an email-based roleplaying game). I tried Le Guin's exercise of rewriting a chunk in every POV and tense I could think of, and was shocked how much had to change. I was edging toward the unhappy conclusion that it had to be first-person present--which I don't know how to write--when I put that project aside.
First-person past tense, to me, has more of a sense of narrator than tight-third past tense. You can write a non-reflective tight third, where the character doesn't know anything about what happened after the bit you're telling, and has only the perspective they had at the time of the event. If you try to do that in first person, it doesn't (to me) quite feel right. The first-person narrator seems to me to need somewhere to stand. In Zelazny's Amber books we eventually find out where he is standing, from tiny clues throughout the series; and it would be told differently if he were standing somewhere/somewhen else when he tells us about it. (Corwin is very much a Narrator, admittedly, to the extent of telling the reader at one point that something is none of their business.) In _Name of the Wind_ I think that's also the case. I guess it doesn't have to be the same time/place throughout the book...but I don't have a good idea how this works, which is why I write tight-third instead.
There's a convention that you can ignore where the narrator's standing, but that's about the only thing you can say about it. Either the convention lets you suspend disbelief or it doesn't.
It didn't for this story, anyway. At the start Catalina is conventionally "sane," heavily in denial, and deeply ignorant of her own backstory. By the point where the game stopped (not, alas, an ending) she's none of those things and her narrative voice is very different. I just can't wrap my head around that in first person past. (Though the fact that I wrote those first-person-present sections--the second-person are of course the GM--is perhaps coloring my reaction. I'd need a different story to use as a control.)
I once read a purported memoire about a white woman who was the apprentice of a Native shaman. All other issues aside, the fact that it used the convention you mention (told like tight-third with pronoun swap, no distance or perspective on the events) felt like a purely fictional mode that really did not work for memoire. This awful book may have contributed to my feeling that it doesn't work in general. Will have to pad through my library looking for better examples. Tanith Lee's _The Birthgrave_, I guess: her protagonist knows even less of her own backstory at the start than Catalina did....
Some years ago I was poking at a pile of text which was alternating first-person present tense and second-person present tense (it was an email-based roleplaying game). I tried Le Guin's exercise of rewriting a chunk in every POV and tense I could think of, and was shocked how much had to change. I was edging toward the unhappy conclusion that it had to be first-person present--which I don't know how to write--when I put that project aside.
First-person past tense, to me, has more of a sense of narrator than tight-third past tense. You can write a non-reflective tight third, where the character doesn't know anything about what happened after the bit you're telling, and has only the perspective they had at the time of the event. If you try to do that in first person, it doesn't (to me) quite feel right. The first-person narrator seems to me to need somewhere to stand. In Zelazny's Amber books we eventually find out where he is standing, from tiny clues throughout the series; and it would be told differently if he were standing somewhere/somewhen else when he tells us about it. (Corwin is very much a Narrator, admittedly, to the extent of telling the reader at one point that something is none of their business.) In _Name of the Wind_ I think that's also the case. I guess it doesn't have to be the same time/place throughout the book...but I don't have a good idea how this works, which is why I write tight-third instead.
There's a convention that you can ignore where the narrator's standing, but that's about the only thing you can say about it. Either the convention lets you suspend disbelief or it doesn't.
It didn't for this story, anyway. At the start Catalina is conventionally "sane," heavily in denial, and deeply ignorant of her own backstory. By the point where the game stopped (not, alas, an ending) she's none of those things and her narrative voice is very different. I just can't wrap my head around that in first person past. (Though the fact that I wrote those first-person-present sections--the second-person are of course the GM--is perhaps coloring my reaction. I'd need a different story to use as a control.)
Oh, yes. An enormous difference between a narrator with a clear view and one without it.
I once read a purported memoire about a white woman who was the apprentice of a Native shaman. All other issues aside, the fact that it used the convention you mention (told like tight-third with pronoun swap, no distance or perspective on the events) felt like a purely fictional mode that really did not work for memoire. This awful book may have contributed to my feeling that it doesn't work in general. Will have to pad through my library looking for better examples. Tanith Lee's _The Birthgrave_, I guess: her protagonist knows even less of her own backstory at the start than Catalina did....
Very true that some points of view just don't work.