[Quiet Man Cometh]

I remember the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books. Unfortunately, when I was young I wasn't adventurous enough to actually get a lot out of them.

One of the things I find with first person when I try to write it, is that one must have a very thorough understanding of the narrator's mind. Appearance and physical details not so much as in a third person story, since a narrator doesn't tend to look at him/herself a lot. When I think about it, in each of the first person books that I've read I have almost very little idea of what the characters actually look like.

Frankenstein is written in first person in two ways, in that one man is writting letters to his sister, in which he copies the narrations of Victor Frankenstein when they talk. Victor tells his own story in first person, and the current events happening around Victor are told in first person by the other man.

Doctor Glas is made up of diary entries, at the beginning of which the narrator states flat out that what he tells is the truth but not all of the truth, so it makes for curious interpretatios along the way. This novel makes easy sense to me since I write my own diary entries in first person like I'm talking to someone else.

All Quiet on the Western Front is written from the perspective of one of the soldiers who enlisted in the German army with his friends just after high school. The author himself was a soldier so I imagine that helps a lot when getting into the character's mind. I don't think the story is autobiographical at all, if I recall correctly. (I say that a lot. Perhaps I should start looking more stuff up to be sure.) One curious thing about this book, is that at the end, on the opposite side of the last page is a third person paragraph about the death of a man who is not named, but is presumably the narrator. If I didn't happen to see the shadow of the text through the page, I never would have noticed it.