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The narrator is thus directly or indirectly involved in the story being told. A strength of first-person narrative is that the character may also express feelings, thoughts, and experiences, and may reveal him or herself; therefore, the reader usually gains keen insight into the life of the narrator. First-person point of view can also be used to withhold information from the reader, particularly information not available to the narrator.

The intensity of such confessional intimacy can be striking. First-person narratives can appear in several forms: interior monologue, as in Dostoevski's Notes From Underground; dramatic monologue, as in Albert Camus' The Fall; or explicitly, as in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Since the narrator is within the story, he or she may not have knowledge of all the events. For this reason, first-person narrative is often used for detective fiction, so that the reader and narrator uncover the case together. Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd turned this principle on its head by revealing at the end that the narrator had been the killer all along, and had been withholding information from the reader.

First-person-plural narrators tell the story using "we," that is, no individual speaker is identified; the narrator is a member of a group that acts as a unit. First-person-plural point of view occurs rarely but can be used effectively, sometimes as a means to increase the concentration on the character or characters the story is about. Examples: William Faulkner in A Rose for Emily (Faulkner was an avid experimenter in using unusual points of view - see his Spotted Horses, told in third person plural), and more recently, Jeffrey Eugenides, in his novel The Virgin Suicides.

First-person narrators can also be multiple, as in AkutagawaAkutagawa, Ryunosuke ( or , March 1, 1892 July 24, 1927) was a Japanese writer. Akutagawa wrote no full-length novels, focusing instead on the short story as his main medium of expression. During his short life, he wrote over 150 short stories, including's In a GroveIn a Grove Yabu no Naka is a 1922 short tale by Akutagawa Ryunosuke that, along with the short story Rashomon provided the plot for Akira Kurosawa's movie Rashomon''. The tale, inspired on an episode of the Konjaku Monogatari gives three witness accounts (the source for the movie RashomonRashomon is a Japanese motion picture made in 1950 by director Akira Kurosawa. It is one of Kurosawa's masterpieces, starring Toshiro Mifune. Based on two stories by Akutagawa Ryunosuke Rashomon and In a Grove it describes a crime (a rape and a murder) th) and Faulkner's novel The Sound and the FuryThe Sound and the Fury is a novel written by William Faulkner. It was his fourth novel, and was published in 1929. The novel is written in a stream of consciousness style, and is split into four sections: the first from the viewpoint of Benjy Compson, a r. Each of these sources provides different accounts of the same event.

The first-person narrator may be the principal character or one who closely observes the principal character (see Emily Bronte's Wuthering HeightsWuthering Heights is Emily Bronte's only novel. Published in 1847, it has become a classic of English literature, and has given rise to many adaptations, including several films, radio and television dramatisations, and a musical, as well as inspiring a h or F. Scott FitzgeraldCarl Van Vechten, 1937 Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald ( September 24, 1896- December 21, 1940), was a Jazz Age novelist. Born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald is regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th Century. The self-styled spoke's The Great GatsbyThe Great Gatsby was first published in ( 1925) by the one of America's great short novelists, F. Scott Fitzgerald. The story takes place in New York City and Long Island in the 1920s. It has often been described as the epitome of the " Jazz Age" in Ameri, each narrated by a minor character).

First-person narrative can tend towards a stream of consciousness, as in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. The whole of the narrative can itself be presented as a false document, such as a diary, in which the narrator makes explicit reference to the fact that he/she is writing or telling a story.

Perhaps the most convoluted example of a mixed media kind of point of view is Joseph Conrad's novelette Heart of Darkness, which has a double framework: an unidentified narrator describes (in first person plural) Marlow, the principal character, telling his own story in the first person. Thus we have a "we" describing a "he" who talks about "I."