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Just a Late Quaternary Hominin doing the best he can.
Active on AO3 - https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wreybies
Wrey đĩđˇ
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#AwesomeCharacters Certainly. I may even exaggerate it in early drafts just to get into the character's idiolect, to loosen the bolts a bit and feel the space. I'll pull it back in later. I'm almost always in 3rd limited, so it applies to the narrative as well to a certain degree.
In Mieville's book, a single character gets three 1st person chapters, and everyone else is portrayed through 3rd person. It made sense here because the character, a Garuda, is being presented as completely alien to the other denizens of New Crobuzon, thus an alien narrative presentation.
It would depend on if the switch has a solid reason to happen, if I understand why the change in format isoccuring. I can think of only two books I've read where this happens. China Mieville's "Perdido Street Station", and Michael Cunningham's "A Home at the End of the World"
It feels like you are being presented real people whom Cunningham wants you to engage with sympathy and empathy because this is a tragic story of lives only almost lived, of loves only almost realized. It's a gentle, almost fairy tale introduction to the characters. And again, it made sense.
In Cunningham's book, the chapters that respectively introduce each of the ensemble of 4 starts with the narrator speaking at the reader, as if in 2nd person. This happens for a couple of paragraphs and then the narrator slides back into an unobtrusive 3rd person for the rest of the book.
I would likely really only find it confusing if I weren't able to parse why the shifts where happening. If it's just quirk, that's gonna leave me hunting for something more than quirk, something deeper, and that's where the confusion would come into play if I don't find anything deeper.
