"I'm talking here!"

People in a painting lean into the frame looking straight down or directly at the viewer with sky behind them

(Paul Robert Turner 1975)

In this lesson, one of the important things we'll talk about is whose opinion is this: the character or the narrator?

To make it easy, we'll start with examples of first person narration, in which the narrator and the character are the same person.

(Be aware that all of this applies to characters in third person narration as well.)

For more on first person narration, see the lesson on Point of View.