The William Trevor Reader: “A School Story”
Six stories in, and “A School Story” is our first encounter with a first-person narrator; if memory serves, the remainder of the collection maintains something like this ratio, and we get about five third-persons for every one first-person. Most writers, I think it’s fair to say, are partial to either third or first person, and with short story writers, this proclivity becomes more obvious due to volume. , , , , —to pick names wildly out of my brain hat—are mostly first-person specialists; , , , , and are mostly third-person writers. Some writers like are almost homophilic in their POV devotion—as far as I know, Salter wrote one story in first, and it is his worst. Some freaks like —always enragingly brilliant and sui generis—are great at both. (A glance at the above lists, by the way, would suggest that third-person is an older tradition, less favored in contemporary writers, something I believe to be true and unfortunate and have written about in various places before, for instance .)
