The first thing that I was really drawn to from this chapter was the discussion of distance in stories. I have never thought about this before. The part about emotional distance was especially eye-opening for me. I had never thought that your audience may be more connected with your readers if you have much less emotional distance between your narrator and your character. “If the narrator is close enough to feel the cold on the character’s lips, we presume the narrator’s empathy for the character” (98). More empathy/less emotional distance paints a clearer picture for me when reading a story. I feel like when there is more emotional distance, I don’t really connect with it and the story is blander.
I also found it interesting that the book claims that all first-person narrators are unreliable. This makes sense because one person engulfed in their own story cannot see the story from the fill breadth of all the characters in the story. Also, there is always a possibility that there is part of the truth of the story that this character isn’t aware of. Meaning it’s sometimes hard for the reader to tell what’s the actual reality in the story and what’s fake. However, does this mean we can’t trust any characters that are first-person? This could even be part of the plot where the truth is revealed towards the end.
