My book is told entirely from the viewpoint of a single character, so is a prime candidate for first-person narration. However, he is uneducated and a child, so I was wondering - how much should tone-of-voice enter into narration? Should the non-dialogue segments be regular prose: or should it reflect the maturity and capacity of the narrator: My instinct says the former is preferable, but I'd be interested if anyone has any recommendations for books that employ the latter style (or something in between).
If he's uneducated, then the first example doesn't work for me. That's not the way an uneducated narrator would present things. It certainly doesn't sound like a child. If you want to do it that way, you should switch to third person. The second example might be over-doing it a bit, but you need to capture the voice of the narrator if you're going with first person, and that includes the narrator's biases, education (or lack there of), speech patterns, &c. Not sure I can think of any examples, off-hand, of an uneducated child presenting a first-person narrative. There are some kids books like the Junie B. Jones series. Junie is a smart girl, but she uses a lot of incorrect grammer in her speaking, and the first-person narrative reflects that. She sounds like a first-grade kid telling a story. It is probably worth looking at a couple to see how Barbara Park pulls it off.
What did Catcher in the Rye teach us about this question? Yes, in first person narration, style should mimic content (true for most things, I suppose).
Good example. Tom Sawyer is probably a good counter-example where first-person would have been too contrived, while third-person works well.
Have read it (although seem to have given it away at some point) - I'd forgotten that it was first-person, as opposed to the third-person of Tom Sawyer.
