Tag: literature

Let Me Tell You My Story: The First Person Narrative

For the last few posts I’ve been discussing the importance of the point of view that a story uses and how narrarive perspectives can impact the story. We’re now onto the last perspective that can be used in story telling, which is first person.

What is a First Person Narrative?

First person perspective is when the story is written with the narrator as the protagonist who has experienced or is experiencing the events of the narrative. It is an intimate perspective, designed to elicit the experience of the reader being told a first person account of a story, with access to the narrator’s thoughts and feelings throughout.

One mistake at the end of my life couldn’t erase all the times I had stood unmoved at the edge of the abyss and made snide remarks at its expense. They could kill me, but they couldn’t have me. I was my own.

Ghost Story – Jim Butcher

To imagine a book as a real life scenario, in first person narratives you are sitting down next to another person and that person is sharing a piece of their life story, including both the events and their own thoughts and feelings at the time.

Why use a first person perspective

The intimacy of connection

The most obvious advantage of this perspective over others is how closely connected you are with the narrator. This is a far more intimate perspective than even third person limited (which I discuss here) because the narrator has invited you in, they’re actively telling you their story and sharing their experiences. As a reader, you’re not just observing what happens: you’re being asked to share in it.

From a psychological perspective, humans are profoundly social species. Our brains are wired to  connect to others and experiencing that connection has been shown to activate brain areas associated with physical safety and warmth.

A first person narrative is an extreme in human connection. A person who is willing to share every little detail of their experience with you, right down to their personal thoughts and feelings. As a social animal, we’re likely to find this highly rewarding – provided we see something in the story that we’re interested in connecting with.

Detailed Character Development

First person narratives allow for a detailed exploration of the narrator’s character, in a way that no other perspective does.

There are several examples where the first person perspective exposes us to detailed elements of the narrator’s thinking style and personality that we wouldn’t really have access to otherwise.

One would be The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, which is narrated by an autistic teenager and gives unique insights into his perspective of the world around him.

I like dogs. You always know what a dog is thinking. It has four moods. Happy, sad, cross and concentrating. Also, dogs are faithful and they do not tell lies because they cannot talk.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

The premise of the book stems in part from his own unique viewpoint – when he finds a dead dog, he sees it as a murder and sets out to investigate and find the killer.  Even the way in which the narrative is presented offers insight into the character that the reader might not otherwise have access to – such as the way that he describes his thoughts and experiences using diagrams.

Of course, the flip side of such a personal account is that it’s inherently biased and potentially unreliable. As far as our social brains are concerned, that’s part of the fun. We love puzzles and gain satisfaction from solving them. Solving social puzzles has the additional benefit of adding to our understanding of other people – so if we distrust an unreliable narrator, we feel rewarded to be proven right; or if they catch us out, we get the buzz from the shock of the surprise.

One well-known example of an unreliable narrator is Pi Patel from The Life of Pi, who recounts his fantastical story of surviving stranded at sea with a tiger named Richard Parker and then presents an alternative, more realistic but also more brutal, version of events and we as readers need to decide which we would prefer to be true.

I was giving up. I would have given up – if a voice hadn’t made itself heard in my heart. The voice said “I will not die. I refuse it. I will make it through this nightmare. I will beat the odds, as great as they are. I have survived so far, miraculously. Now I will turn miracle into routine.

The Life of Pi – Yann Martel

Only in a first person narrative could a story be called into question to such a degree. Most other perspectives lead to an assumption that the story is being observed in some way by the reader, albeit with a potentially biased filter imposed by the narrator. Whereas in first person, we’re living in someone’s mind – and we all know how inaccurate our own perceptions can sometimes be!

Societal Issues at an Individual Level

Another powerful use of a first person narrative is to use the individual narrator as a  way to speak to a wider societal issue, either as a form of analysis or critique.

A wonderful example of this is Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. This book explores the lives of Kathy and her friends, who are clones created to be organ donors. In her world, they are seen as less than human. Kathy’s role is to care for and reduce the ‘agitation’ of fellow donors. She is never in a position where she can fight against her place in society but her own first person narrative does that for her – it humanises her and her friends, connecting the reader with them in a way that those in her world refuse to.

Or another example would be Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. An unnamed narrator, who feels disenfranchised from society and its definitions of manhood, turns to Tyler Durden. Tyler Durden starts a fight club and then a cult-like organisation, which engages in increasingly dangerous anti-consumerist attacks. At first, the narrator seems to be just another follower of Durden, until it emerges that he has dissociative identity disorder and he and Durden are the same person.

The first person perspective gives the reader a unique insight into the mind of the narrator, seeing the world as he convinces himself it is, rather than how it really is. We follow along with him, watching Durden grow increasingly out of control. Even once the narrator knows the truth, events have already moved beyond him, leaving him just as helpless in the face of Durden’s actions as he was in the face of the society that he struggled to fit in to.

What first person perspectives can’t do

By definition, this perspective is the story of one person. Everything that the reader sees has to have been seen by them. While events could be shared with them by other characters, if a lot of action happens away from the narrator then this can leave the reader feeling disconnected from the story.

This means that the narrative in a first person story is often narrower in focus than other perspectives. In third person limited, the camera might pick up on details that the protagonist misses. In third person omniscient the narrator can see anything that they need to for the sake of the story. Even second person can take on a more omniscient form when required.

One solution to this is to include multiple first person perspectives, like in Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, which relies heavily on both narrators being unreliable and obscuring the reality of the story. This can work well as a way to tell an immersive story from multiple angles, building a wider picture than with a single point of view. However, there is a risk of confusion for the reader in terms of who is speaking and when, which means that in many cases third person is often easier – allowing the narrative to follow the protagonists closely without any confusion around which character is the current focus.

More generally, some people can find a first person perspective to be too immersive and can be put off by the story as a result. They may not connect with the narrator or they may feel frustrated that they aren’t seeing aspects of the other characters’ stories. Therefore it has to be clear why those other aspects are less important to the themes of the story than the mind of the narrator itself, or people may struggle to join the narrator on their journey.

 

 About The Author

Caroline Ashley storytelling blog author

 Caroline Ashley is a clinical psychologist who works for the NHS in Scotland. She enjoys all forms of fantasy and is fascinated with the ways in which the fantastical can speak to our everyday lives. If Caroline had any spare time around work, writing and raising her two young children, she would spend it playing board games.

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The Use of Second Person Point of View in Fiction

After introducing the psychology behind perspective taking and literary points of view in How theory of mind leads to effective storytelling, I wanted to go into more detail about the impact of different points of view on our experience of a story.

I’m going to start with the point of view that’s used the least often – the second person.

What is Second Person Point of View

In this point of view, the narrator turns the reader into the protagonist, speaking as if the reader themselves were the one who experienced the narrative.

This point of view is rarely experienced in day to day life. When people tell us stories, they’re usually describing their own experiences, so will use the first person, or they’re recounting something that happened to someone else, and would use the third person.

There are a few uses of the second person that you might be familiar with. When someone you know is asking for your opinion, they might ask you to put yourself in their shoes: “If you were happy with your job, but were offered one with better salary, would you take it?”. Or they might use the second person in subtle ways to involve the listener in an event that’s being recounted, for example: “The ball hit the net and you could hear the crowd go wild.”

In literature, the second person is more often used in non-fiction, where the author may be directing their readers to particular actions. It is much less common in fiction, though one example of it that most people will be aware of is with ‘choose your own adventure’ books. Those stories where you can pick what choice the character makes, thus creating your own narrative and deciding how the story ends.

How is second person used

There are three main ways in which a second person narrative can be used in a story:

The narrator is addressing the reader

This takes the form of the narrator talking to the reader about things that the reader has done. The narrator is omniscient and knows everything about the reader’s character, much as if the story was in the first person. Choose your own adventure books take on this form, where an unknown narrator is describing the reader’s story to them.

The narrator is addressing themselves

This approach might be used to show that the narrator is distancing themselves from something that has happened to them. They struggle to admit that they are narrating about themselves so address the reader instead or it may be that it’s written as if some subconscious part of their conscience is speaking for them.

An example of this form would be the short story How To Be An Other Woman by Lorrie Moore, where the narrator struggles to own her behaviour and so distances herself from it by writing in the second person.

Love drains you, takes with it much of your blood sugar and water weight. You are like a house slowly losing its electricity, the fans slowing, the lights dimming and flickering; the clocks stop and go and stop.

Lorrie Moore

The narrator is addressing another character

Technically this is a very intimate form of first person narrative. The narrator is talking about their experience but addressing their story specifically to the reader rather than to a general audience. An example of this would be You by Caroline Kepnes, where the narrator is describing his obsession for a woman:

You smile, embarrassed to be a nice girl, and your nails are bare and your V-neck sweater is beige and it’s impossible to know if you’re wearing a bra but I don’t think that you are.

Caroline Kepnes

What is the impact of second person point of view

It makes the reader feel responsible for the events of the story

Because this point of view brings the reader into the narrative, it can serve to make them feel complicit in the events that come to pass. It can feel like the narrator is telling us what we have done, reminding us of our actions. Take Iain Banks novel, Complicity, where scenes with a murderer are all written in the second person:

She was quivering with fear when you looked into her face. You knew you looked terrifying in the dark balaclava, but there was nothing you could do about that.

Iain Banks

In this novel, Banks’ words at times take on an accusing tone, as if the narrator is holding the reader to account for their murderous actions.

As social animals, we often have an emotional reaction to feeling accused, whether falsely or not. We may feel guilty, ashamed, or angry and rejected. In this novel, Banks attempts to take advantage of that response by having the narrator recount our misdeeds.

In many ways, Joe McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City works to elicit emotions in a similar way. Telling the story of a serial cheater, it’s as if his conscience is writing the story, bringing to light the mistakes that he has made, and judging his actions.

You have friends that actually care about you and speak the language of the inner self. You have avoided them of late. Your soul is as dishevelled as your apartment, and until you can clean it up a little you don’t want to invite anyone inside.

Joe McInerney

It forces the reader to inhabit an experience

Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson explores a love story between two Black people in London, reflecting on the impact of racism and generational trauma on the protagonist. The use of the second person gives a sense of intimacy to the story. It asks the reader to live the protagonist’s life, to immerse themselves in the pain and loss, and to learn something about his unique experience.

Sometimes you forget that to be you is to be unseen and unheard, or it is to be seen and heard in ways you did not ask for.

Caleb Azumah Nelson

Alternatively, in You by Caroline Kepnes, the reader is made the object of someone’s obsession and asked to experience the impact of that obsession.

It speaks to the narrator’s pain

There is a contrast in the use of the second person for painful events – the author is on the one hand suggesting that the story is too painful for the narrator to embrace it as their own, but on the other hand inviting the reader to understand that pain.

N.K. Jemisin uses this to powerful effect in her Broken Earth series:

You are she. She is you. You are Essun. Remember? The woman whose son is dead.

N.K. Jemisin

The pitfalls of the second person point of view

There are good reasons why this isn’t a common narrative form. The times when it can be used to good effect are in some ways quite specific and if a reader doesn’t feel the use is justified they can struggle to embrace the writing style.

Second person narratives require a big suspension of disbelief, a willingness on the reader’s part to embrace the character they are being asked to inhabit. This becomes more difficult to do the longer the story goes, so often it’s most successfully used within a short story or as part of a longer piece. It is particularly difficult for a reader if the events of the story are traumatic or distressing. Our natural response to feeling threatened is often to protect ourselves from threat, which can mean that readers disengage from second person narratives when the story becomes too emotionally challenging – leading to them needing more distance from the story than they would have if they had been reading in first person.

In addition to this, some readers just aren’t able to connect with second person stories in the same way as first or third. It is too unfamiliar to them and it requires too much cognitive effort on their part to engage with the narrative. This means that for any story written in the second person, there is likely to be a group of readers who simply struggle to enjoy the narrative, no matter how well written.

It is also difficult to get right. There’s a tricky balance between too little and too much information about the character in second person point of view: too little and they don’t feel like fully fleshed individuals, but too much and we struggle to relate to them, which is absolutely necessary for second person point if view to work. Less experienced writers also often don’t put as much thought into their narrator as they do into their characters, not truly considering why their story is being told and to whom, and, without this, second person narratives risk coming across as more of a gimmick than a considered plan around how best to tell the story.

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About the Author

Caroline Ashley is a clinical psychologist who works for the NHS in Scotland. She loves fantasy in all forms and is fascinated by the ways in which the fantasical can speak to our everyday lives.

How theory of mind leads to effective storytelling

Storytelling is all about sharing a point of view. When we read or listen to a story, we’re learning something about the perspective of the storyteller or their characters. Stories can make us feel connected to the protagonist; they can build anticipation for the ending; they can make us question our views of the world. But what is it that that makes stories so effective in triggering these thoughts and feelings?

What is Theory of Mind?

Communicating a point of view in a story starts with theory of mind. Every human has the capacity to put themselves into the mind of another, to consider that someone else might have a different perspective to them. We develop this skill as children, with some of us being better at it than others for various social, environmental and cognitive reasons. The concept of theory of mind relates largely to cognitive perspective taking. This means it relates to interpreting the thoughts, desires and intentions of others, which we use to infer reasons for their behaviour or to predict their behaviour. Psychologists describe it as a theory because it’s impossible to ever truly prove our assumptions about another person’s mind – we’ll never see or experience it the way they do.

Another related concept is empathy, which researchers describe as emotional perspective taking. This is our ability to recognise and understand the emotions of others, basically to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes and consider how a situation might make them feel.

Theory of Mind and the Role of Language

In my previous blog post Why Do We Tell Stories, I wrote about the power of language. We are the only animal that we’re aware of that’s capable of communicating complex symbolic meanings. We are capable of describing events that have never happened, or that we have never experienced, in order to express an underlying message to our audience.

In the same way, this linguistic ability gives us the framework for conceptualising the experience of another person. Other animals have been shown to have some theory of mind, for example, crows are able to infer that another crow may not have the same knowledge as them; chimpanzees and bonobos have shown some ability to infer the intentions and emotions of others. But researchers all agree that the theory of mind these animals evidence is far less than that of humans. We don’t really know for sure why that is, but there does seem to be a strong link between language fluency and the development of theory of mind and empathy.

As we’re teaching our children to speak, often we’re also teaching them something about theory of mind at the same time. For example, when my son starts crying and I ask “Are you sad?, I’m giving him the label that I use to describe that emotion in myself. If I’m combing his hair and pull too hard, I’ll say “Sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you” and he’ll know that what happened wasn’t my intention. When I plan to have toast and realise there isn’t any bread, if I say “I didn’t know you and Daddy finished the bread”, I’m teaching him that my knowledge was different to his until I went into the kitchen. Language allows us to access the inner worlds of other people in a way that just wouldn’t be possible otherwise.

Theory of Mind and Storytelling

Another thing that researchers have found is that our brains are particularly interested in narratives. Partly, this is because they’re easier to remember: they have a structure that we can follow and a context that we can put them in. But it’s also because narratives have a social value. We tell stories to share information about ourselves or our experiences, and we find stories engaging because there’s an evolutionary advantage to being given the information that others want to share. In the past, that might have been information about food sources, or whether other people were trustworthy, or signs of a predator. Now, our stories might be more complicated but we still listen to them to build our social understanding.

Brain imaging studies have shown that when we listen to narratives rather than just unrelated verbal information, different areas of the brain are activated. This extends even to fictional stories. When we are told about the thoughts, feelings and behaviours of a character, our brains work to take their perspective in the same way we would with a real person. In this way, simple stories can be used to help children to practice theory of mind and develop their social and emotional understanding of others, while adults can emotionally connect with characters, allowing stories to take on more meaning and become more memorable.

Point of View

Within storytelling, there are three main points of view that a narrative can take:

First Person:

This is the point of view that you’re most likely to hear in stories told during your everyday life. It is a story where the narrator is also the protagonist and they are telling you about something that happened to them e.g.:

I did the only thing any reasonable wizard could have done. I turned around and ran like hell.

Jim Butcher

Second Person:

In this point of view, the narrator turns the reader into the protagonist, speaking as if the reader themselves were the one who experienced the narrative.

You’re still trying to decide who to be. The self you’ve been lately doesn’t make sense anymore; that woman died with Uche.

N.K. Jemisin

Third Person:

The most commonly used point of view in fiction, third person provides the reader with a camera through which they can see the action happening to the characters in the narrative. This perspective is similar to our usual life experiences: we watch others as they speak and act, separated from them unless they tell us their own first person account.

Bilbo was very rich and very peculiar, and had been the wonder of the Shire for sixty years, ever since his remarkable disappearance and unexpected return.

J.R.R. Tolkien

How do theory of mind and point of view interact with each other?

Each different type of point of view invites the reader to engage with a narrative in a particular way and each will require different aspects of theory of mind.

In first person POV, we’re being told someone’s story. They’re making a direct attempt to share something of themselves with us. This taps into our social desire to engage with, empathise and understand those around us, and to build human connections.

In second person POV, the narrator asks us to imagine that we are the protagonist, to put ourselves in the narrative. This is a tricky one to get right, if the actions of the character are too far removed from what we think our own might be, but it can have the powerful effect of leaving us feeling like we personally understand the experience of the story.

Third person POV draws on the skills we use every day in observing those around us but often with the added element of access to the internal experiences of the characters, which generally makes us feel more emotionally invested in them.

The point of view that is most effective for the narrative being told is dependent on the aims of the storyteller, but all of them take advantage of our ability to take the perspectives of the protagonists and empathise with their experiences.

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About the Author

Caroline Ashley Author storytelling blog

Caroline Ashley is a clinical psychologist who works for the NHS in Scotland. She loves fantasy in all forms and is fascinated by the ways in which the fantasical can speak to our everyday lives.

Merry Christmas!

Spillwords have published a Christmas story of mine called Fireside Memories. This was one of the first short stories I wrote after getting back into writing in early 2022, submitted to a Globe Soup contest to the theme of ‘an unlikely friendship’. I liked the idea of making the story about a man and ‘man’s best friend’, except in a world where that isn’t entirely the case any more. I’ve edited it a lot since the original draft and I also made it Christmassy for the submissions call with Spillwords, so it is a bit different from the first version. I’ve had some lovely feedback from other writers since it’s been published, which is a great little gift right before Christmas.

Finally, today I’ve uploaded another blog post, this time about using Aristotle’s rhetorical appeals (logos, ethos and pathos) in writing fiction. This is an example of The Rule of Three in action – Aristotle separates quite a few of his concepts into three parts, likely because he knew the rhetorical power of things that come in threes. His writing was clearly effective, given that we’re still talking about him more than two thousand years later!

This is my last post of 2023 so all that’s left is to thank you for following my blog this year and I hope you continue to enjoy my work next year. See you in 2024! 🥳

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Using simile and metaphor to write effective stories

We humans are masters at storytelling. We search for patterns, meaning and similarities in everything around us. We structure our experiences in ways that help us to make sense of our world and how it works. And then we tell our ‘stories’ to our family and friends, or our online followers, in an attempt to share a little of what we’ve learned from life.

Telling memorable stories

There are certain rhetorical devices that writers can use, techniques that help them to keep a reader or listener’s attention and build their investment in the story.

One example of this is the use of personification and anthropomorphism, which I talk about further in The Use of Anthropomorphism in Fiction. In these cases, the writer imbues human characteristics either literally or figuratively in animals or inanimate objects in order to emphasise their themes or say something about their characters. When we think of something as being like a human, we inevitably feel more connected with it, because we can use our own experiences to empathise and make sense of their behaviour.

Another way that writers can achieve a similar goal is through the use of simile and metaphor, which can be used to strengthen descriptive images.

What are simile and metaphor?

Simile and metaphor both involve using figurative language to compare one thing to another, but function in slightly different ways.

When a writer uses simile, they describe an object by comparing it to something else using ‘like’ or ‘as’. Some examples would be:

Oh my luve is like a red, red rose.

Robert Burns

His smile was as stiff as a frozen fish.

Raymond Chandler

When a writer uses a metaphor, they describe something as if it were something else. For example:

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.

William Shakespeare

My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations.

John Green

Metaphors can also be extended to compare two things on more than one level. An example for this would be ‘Hope is a Thing with Feathers’ by Emily Dickinson, where the whole poem is an extended metaphor describing hope with bird-like features.

Metaphors are generally considered to be more impactful than similes, because they assert that the objects in question are essentially the same as each other. Similes on the other hand function more as a suggestion to us, they plant an idea in our heads but leave us to imagine the details. Take for example “My anger is a raging fire” versus “My anger is like a raging fire”. In the first, we picture a literal fire and connect it with the character’s anger, whereas in the second, we picture the features of a fire – hot, hard to control, destructive – and consider what parts link with the character’s emotion.

Both devices have their place in a story. If a writer were to spend the entire narrative just using metaphors, we’re likely to disengage, feeling that we’re being told what to think. But equally, if they only use simile, the writer risks losing their voice, relying on the reader to infer the majority of the description. Good fiction uses the right one at the right time in order to strengthen the narrative and immerse the reader in each moment.

What makes a bad metaphor or simile

Similes and metaphors don’t always work well when they are used. We might read one and just feel that it doesn’t work, doesn’t help us to better picture the image, or just that it takes us out of the story for some reason – here are a few reasons why that might happen:

It’s a cliché

We all know some clichéd similes and metaphors: dead as a doornail; fine kettle of fish; wipe the slate clean. And there are two reasons why we find them jarring in fiction. Firstly, because we know them so well, and have heard them in other contexts, we no longer imagine them figuratively, which means that they lose their impact. Secondly, often these clichéd comparisons have lost some of their meaning over time because our way of life has changed – doornails were hammered so deeply you couldn’t easily remove them; fish kettles were long saucepans that used to be common kitchen utensils; and a clean slate comes from wiping a writing slate clean in classrooms.

The objects being compared are too alike

When this happens, the comparison becomes redundant and just doesn’t add to the story. An example might be saying that bubblegum popped like a balloon – both pop in fairly similar ways, so what does the comparison add to the image?

It doesn’t fit with the tone/atmosphere

Figurative language can throw us out of a story if it evokes an image that doesn’t fit well with the scene that we’re reading. An example of this is in City of Bones by Cassandra Clare, when the main characters are in a nightclub and one is being watched by a vampire:

Around her neck was a thick silver chain, on which hung a dark red pendant the size of a baby’s fist

While the comparison might be accurate for what Clare is describing, how does the image of a baby add to the dark tone that she’s already established?

Another way that a simile or metaphor might break the atmosphere is to refer to something that wouldn’t exist in the time of the narrative. For example, referring to the speed of a bullet or the ticking of a clock in a story where those haven’t been invented yet. While mentioning them in the narrative might not technically be anachronistic, depending on the narrator, they serve to make us think about the modern world when the writer wants us immersed in the past.

What makes an effective simile or metaphor?

Being true to the narrative voice

The strongest similes and metaphors will fit well with the voice of the narrator. This would include consideration of the story’s setting, its tone, its themes and things that the narrator is likely to know. Take for example this quote by Terry Pratchett in Mort:

Ankh- Morpork is as full of life as an old cheese on a hot day, as loud as a curse in a cathedral, as bright as an oil slick, as colourful as a bruise and as full of activity, industry, bustle and sheer exuberant busyness as a dead dog on a termite mound

All of the comparisons made are of things that might be found in a pre-industrial revolution city like Ankh-Morpork, so they fit with the narrator’s level of knowledge. They also fit with the humourous tone of the book by using examples that speak to the unrefined, crime ridden nature of the people within the city.

Another example comes from Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass:

Because Lyra now realized, if she hadn’t done so before, that all the fear in her nature was drawn to Mrs. Coulter as a compass needle drawn to the Pole

Since this book focuses on Lyra’s use of a device called an alethiometer that looks like a compass and responds to human intent, this simile fits well with Lyra’s viewpoint, using a comparison that is related to her recent experiences.

Any good metaphor or simile considers what their narrator or viewpoint character might think of when making a comparison. A good story remembers that the story is not just written for the reader but written by a narrator and if that narrator is from a certain time period or country or world then the figurative language they use should also exist within that context.

The importance of specificity

A lot of the most cliché similes and metaphors are quite general, for example, “quiet as a mouse”, “life is a journey”, “cold as ice”. While these comparisons do give some extra information, they don’t evoke a strong image or clear idea of what the writer is trying to convey. If they weren’t already well-known, they would be unlikely to stick in our minds after being read.

Effective similes and metaphors add a level of specificity. If the comparison evokes an image of a certain moment or emotion, then it’s easier for the reader to picture. Compare “quiet as a mouse in a house full of cats” or “cold as the ice on Triton” to the more well-known examples.

But we can also look to literature for examples of specificity adding more than just additional imagery:

Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away, as if I’m nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water.

Margaret Atwood, A Handmaid’s Tale

He looks like right after the maul hits the steer and it no longer alive and don’t yet know that it is dead.

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

Both of these examples describe an actual moment that the reader can imagine, thus strengthening the image that they are trying to evoke. They also weave in additional elements that speak to the emotions that the writer is trying to convey – the detail of being left by a “careless” child speaks to an idea that there may have been a way to be more careful, to defend against the waves of time. And with Faulkner, the example is of an animal caught off guard, still processing the impact of a sudden, negative change.

Remembering not to overdo it

A good writer thinks about what parts of their story are most important and would benefit from the emphasis of figurative language. Every piece of figurative language involves needing to access information about the object being compared and what we know about it, in order to understand the meaning beneath the comparison. If there are too many in a short space of time, we essentially become fatigued and lose interest. Or, if figurative language emphasises a part of the story that isn’t that important, we can also be left feeling unclear about what point the writer was trying to get across.

Deciding what works for the story

Any ‘rule’ of writing is made to be broken. However, there is a difference between just not knowing the rules and making a conscious decision not to follow them. In the same way that a skilled chef might deviate from a recipe because their taste buds suggest something different, a skilled writer can learn to subvert reader expectations and break the rules in ways that strengthen rather than weaken their story.

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Caroline Ashley

Caroline Ashley is a clinical psychologist who works for the NHS in Scotland. She loves fantasy in all forms and is fascinated by the ways in which the fantasical can speak to our everyday lives.

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CATS ARE NICE (The Use of Anthropomorphism in Fiction)

“‘I meant,’ said Ipslore bitterly, ‘what is there in this world that truly makes living worthwhile?’
Death thought about it.
CATS, he said eventually. CATS ARE NICE.”

– Sir Terry Pratchett

What is anthropomorphism?

The above quote is an example of a character interacting with an anthropomorphic personification of a natural phenomenon. In simpler terms, this is when a non-human object or animal (or concept in this case) is shown to display human traits and be capable of human behaviour. Death in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series is a sentient being, who raises a daughter, hires an apprentice and, as noted in this quote, has his own personal likes and dislikes. His existence is shown on several occasions to ease the process of dying, making death an experience that is tinged with a level of familiarity, and less scary as a result. Pratchett also uses him as a tool through which he can observe and reflect on the complexities of life and death, though the perspective of a character who technically experiences neither.

There is a slight distinction to be made between anthropomorphism and personification, two similar but distinct literary devices. Anthropomorphism involves imbuing non-human things with human traits and human behaviour, for example, the animals in Animal Farm; or Thomas the Tank Engine; or Winnie the Pooh. Personification involves giving inanimate objects or natural phenomena human-like characteristics, like saying that the sun is smiling or opportunity is knocking at the door. Personification is intended to be more figurative, while anthropomorphism is more literal.

Death in the Discworld is technically an anthropomorphism, although he is used by other characters as a personification, so he is really a bit of both.

Why do we anthropomorphise?

There have been many theories about the reasons for anthropomorphism throughout history. David Hume, a philosopher and scientist with an interest in the origins of religious beliefs, argued that anthropomorphism was an attempt to rationalise an unfamiliar world using the model that humans were most knowledgeable about, namely the model of humans themselves. But then, humans also anthropomorphise animals and objects that they are familiar with, like laughing dogs and spoons that run off with dishes.

Sigmund Freud, the famous psychoanalyst, saw it as an attempt to make a hostile and threatening world into something familiar and thus less threatening.  But humans frequently attempt to personify sounds and images into something scary, like thinking the creak of a floorboard is a burgler.

The true answer is probably a mix of both. Humans look for patterns and stories in the world. Our brains are predisposed to see connections and to turn disparate parts into wholes. In doing so, we rationalise something unknown and make it familiar – even if we believe it’s something dangerous, at least it’s a danger that we can categorise.

Remember Heidel and Simmel’s moving shapes from my post about why we tell stories? These were an example of anthropomorphism, where basic shapes were conferred human intention and behaviour by their observers with the purpose of making sense of the movements they were seeing. And there is a survival benefit in being predisposed to see agency in the world around us – there is less of a cost to mistakenly thinking that a moving object is alive, than there is in ignoring a living creature that’s a potential threat.

We can find examples of anthropomorphism in stories across human history. Native Americans and Australian Aboriginals used animals to tell stories about the creation of the world and teach moral lessons about society. Religions across the world historically often described anthropomorphised gods – representations of natural phenomenon like the sun, love or war, who married, grew jealous and had children, just like humans.

As far as the human brain is concerned, we are surrounded by creatures who are just like us, even when they are not.

The use of anthropomorphism in literature

Writers through the ages have often used anthropomorphism within their stories. This device takes advantage of humans’ natural propensity to confer human-like traits on others. The purpose of this device is dependent on the story being told.

Take Animal Farm by George Orwell, for example. This book is a satirical allegory for Russia’s communist revolution, with the animal’s representing different groups or people from Russian history. But yet, the story is removed enough from the reality that it critiques to have lasted the test of time, becoming like a fairy tale, where the underlying message remains relevant regardless of current history.

People read the story without their real world preconceptions being triggered, meaning that the story itself has room to challenge the reader to think about the rights and wrongs of these animals’ decisions and behaviour. The story presents these questions to the reader in far more general terms than a story about people in Russia would have done and thus makes the reader consider their general view on similar situations, rather than their opinion on Russia specifically.

Another powerful example of the use of anthropomorphism is Watership Down by Richard Adams. In this example, the anthropomorphism serves a slightly different purpose. The rabbits in the story have a society much like a human one, with their own culture, mythology and language. The characters exist in a world fraught with danger, with humans being one of the biggest. Here, Adams takes advantage of our preconceptions about rabbits – they’re our pets, they’re cute little animals that we see bounding across the grass. We start off with an image of a vulnerable creature, which serves to further emphasise the risks when the characters are threatened, as well as increasing our empathy for their plight.

This story also challenges the reader by placing them in the position of the enemy against a very humanised group of animals – thus indirectly raising questions around how we treat and understand animals but also how we might treat other humans whose culture is significantly different from our own. If those questions had been posed through the lens of refugees coming to Britain, facing threats from the government or challenges from the locals, I would argue that the story would have lost an element of the emotional resonance and timelessness which has sustained this book’s popularity.

Anthropomorphism for children

The talking animals in children’s stories serve a similar purpose to those in adult literature. They turn the narrative into something that exists outside of known human culture but also tells our children something about how the world works. Anthropomorphism helps children to absorb the underlying message of the story by creating a level of emotional distance from the narrative, allowing for a staged introduction into potential real-life challenges.

Take Little Red Riding Hood. The wolf eats the girl’s grandmother and could have killed her. He’s defeated by the woodsman in the end, but he’s still a dangerous threat to the little girl. Imagine if that wolf was a human – a man who had broken into Grandmother’s house and killed her, then lain in wait to pounce on Little Red. Young children need to be aware there are dangers in the world but we also don’t want them suspicious of every adult they meet. The wolf is a substitute for the real risk, a gentle warning until children are old enough to understand the complexities of human behaviour.

Another, less extreme example of this, is the story of the Ugly Duckling. The poor duckling is rejected by the ducks and made fun of by other animals, until he sheds his downy fur, and is welcomed by a flock of swans come spring. When children read this story, they feel sad for the duckling and learn a bit about acceptance along the way. But what parent would want to read them the story of the Ugly Child – a boy who’s adoptive mother didn’t love him, whose peers made fun of him, and who didn’t really find somewhere to belong until he grew up? The message is the same, but the distance is gone and it starts to feel like something that could happen in the home or in the playground, rather than a distant allegory.

Anthropomorphism done well

The examples that I’ve given from literature mostly use a fully anthropomorphised setting – where everyone is an anthropomorphic animal. But, much as with Terry Pratchett’s Death, this device can be used in smaller ways to achieve an effect within a larger story, such as Aslan the lion from Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia; or Michael Bond’s Paddington Bear; or  the range of fantastical characters in Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.

Anthropomorphism works best when the form of the character is used with purpose. All humans are predisposed to anthropomorphise, which means that we come with a range of preconceptions that can be taken advantage of. Lions are strong predators but also sociable felines; rabbits are cute pets to some and prolific rodents to others. Anthropomorphism that works well in literature often uses these preconceptions to strengthen the story’s character, or does the opposite by subverting expectations.

As well, it’s important to consider why a story is using anthropomorphism. What is it about the theme of the story that means an anthropomorphic character is better than a human? Does the reader need emotional distance to be able to reflect on the underlying meaning of the story, like with The Ugly Duckling? Does the character serve as a way of changing the readers view of an abstract concept, like Death? The purpose doesn’t necessarily need to be obvious to the reader, but the story will be stronger and more meaningful if the writer has considered what it is.

When used well, anthropomorphism can be an effective literary device that serves to strengthen the symbolism and themes within a story. It can turn a narrative into a timeless classic that speaks to the human condition in a manner that will remain relevant across generations.

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About the author

Caroline Ashley author photo

Caroline Ashley is a clinical psychologist who works for the NHS in Scotland. She loves of fantasy in all forms and is fascinated by the ways in which the fantasical can speak to our everyday lives.