Citing a slew of recent novels told from the perspective of “we” or “us” – such as Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to an End, Justin Torres’s We the Animals, and Chang-Rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea – TaraShea Nesbit suggests that the rise of the first-person plural may be especially suited for our times:
Is life in the 21st-century social network less about the node and more about the links between nodes? In first-personal plural fiction, individuated characters can dissolve into the background, as our relationships and responsibilities to our fellow humans are foregrounded. This social awareness is not exactly new – it also exercised Victorian authors writing about town consciousness, as George Eliot did in Middlemarch. However, this new iteration is perhaps a move away from the character-driven plot of the individual “I”. How does one create one’s self in relation to the groups we are a part of? Where do our loyalties lie? What gets lost, and what is gained by group membership? This sense of social responsibility and selfhood, as well as uncertainty about how to act on such feelings, describes, in part, our contemporary moment.
In a similar vein, Art Edwards considers how an author’s method of narration helps him identify with a piece of fiction as a reader:
That’s where the power of fiction truly lies: Despite my wanting to know more about the novelists who write the novels I love, reading one isn’t the act of me learning about the writer’s life. It’s a metaphoric meeting place outside both writer and reader where the two come together. The novel can bridge further physical, cultural, emotional and experiential points, creating a connection that feels deeper. “Look at how different we are on the outside, how similar on the inside.”
Writers shouldn’t be looking for narrators to hide behind but to understand the effects their narrator choices have on the reader, and to make decisions accordingly. If the writer’s story is the whole point, and the writer doesn’t mind being front and center, then it’s best to employ memoir (or its longer sibling autobiography). … A first person point of view (The Name of the World [by Denis Johnson]) keeps the author in the fiction to the greatest degree with third person (Rabbit, Run [by John Updike]) the more distant mode, although even it doesn’t provide perfect cover. Having a detached third person narrator (most of Madame Bovary) leaves only the vaguest shadow of the author, but it’s still there, if only in its conspicuous absence. While fiction may always on some level be a disguise, its imaginative elements invite us to contemplate why the writer bothered to imagine them at all, and therefore, perhaps, to know him best.
The Dish 