When a narrator is included in his or her story, we refer to a form known as the first-person point-of-view. It is the 'I' perspective. This is not to say that the first-person narrator is always the main character of the story, even though this is often the case. Sometimes the narrator observes the main character from a close distance. This is called observer narration, which can be seen in the following passage from The Great Gatsby. 

That’s my Middle West . . . the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark. . . . I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.

The narrator, Nick, goes on to tell the story of his neighbor, Gatsby.

With first-person point-of-view we get to hear the thoughts of the narrator directly, which raises some interesting questions. Can we rely on the truthfulness of the narrator? Or is it an unreliable narrator? Is the narrator speaking directly to us, the reader? Or do we get to listen in on his or her thoughts? Is the narrator speaking to a nebulous, an undefined audience? In the latter case we sometimes see a stream-of-consciousness style, in which grammatical conventions are ignored, such as in this passage from The Handmaid's Tale:

I pray where I am, sitting by the window, looking out through the curtain at the empty garden. I don’t even close my eyes. Out there or inside my head, it’s an equal darkness. Or light.

To summarize, there are several points worth considering in when reading a work written in the first-person point-of-view. 

• Is the narrator an observer or the protagonist?
• Is the narrator reliable or unreliable?
• To whom is the narrator speaking? Is he/she speaking to a nebulous? Or is he/she speaking to the reader directly? (see direct narration)
• If so, does the narrator use a style of stream-of-consciousness style?

Related lessons

• Narrative technique