Posted by David Stewart on May 25, 19100 at 08:57:53:
In Reply to: Re: Kickoff Note from the author: p.o.v posted by Andrew I. Dayton on April 27, 19100 at 13:16:48:
Although I have yet to read "Demi"/"Fall", and look forward to doing so soon, I was struck by the reported comment by the editor that you should change to the third person because the first-person narrator could not possibly remember all of the details in the story when retelling it so much later. This seems to me a very peculiar complaint. Did we really think Ishmael remembered the entire corpus of Moby Dick? That the sea captain (name unremembered by me) remembered the entire story of Lord Jim? Isn't this one of the critical elements of the suspension of disbelief -- we accept the narrator's precision of recollection because it makes a good story, not because we personally could create a 300-page narration of events thiry years in our past? As someone currently working on a first-person story, I am puzzled by the editor's view, though I can readily accept the notion that the story may work as well or better in the third person. It's the rationale that seems odd to me.