on, particularly if the events cannot be cast in chronological
order. On the other hand, first person narration is often a useful
device to keep from the reader's knowledge, unobtrusively and without
seeming effort, matters which he must not learn prematurely. Conan
Doyle's Watson is an instance. Thus the chief disadvantage in employing
the narrating character, that he cannot be made omniscient, may be
turned to advantage. The whole question is one to be determined only
after careful consideration of the demands of a particular story, and
the chief need is not so much to state rules for its solution as to
point out the real necessity that the writer know what he is about
before pitching on a mode of narration. It is a prevalent habit, and a
bad one, to accept a story as it first takes shape in the mind,
narrative, point of view, and all.

There is a tendency among writers of fiction, particularly those who are
just beginning, to narrate in the first person, perhaps because they
feel that the reader will accept the story more readily in such shape.
Other things being equal, first person narration is a trifle more
natural and plausible than narration in the third person, but its
limitations are much more strict. At the last of it, readers are so
thoroughly habituated to the impersonal viewpoint that a writer does not
gain much in power to convince by adoption of the other. A story is
taken up because a story is wanted, and a reader is willing to accept
the conventions of the art. So incredible a fiction as Poe's "A Descent
into the Maelstrom" was probably best told in the first person, but the
average story need not strain so sedulously for verisimilitude so far as
the mechanics of narration are concerned.

Typical third person narration is illustrated by the story of action,
the wholly objective story, told in the third person. The impersonal
relator is omniscient, but his omniscience is not so obtrusive as in the
story that touches on the facts of the soul. This omniscience of the
relator is the chief advantage of third person narration, but the writer
will only infrequently find it advisable to assume omniscience absolute
and entire, involving knowledge of all the objective acts and the
subjective motives of all the characters. If the story is largely
analytical of more than one character the writer may be forced to "know
it all" in order to display his material. But omniscience carried to
such a point tends to be ove