We can do a lot: the rise of first-person plural narration

Stories told by 'we' and 'us' are more and more popular, and are proving a much more flexible voice than you might think

In early Greek drama, the chorus stood together near the orchestra, and commented on the main action above. They delivered their lines in unison, sometimes in half-chorus, or sometimes in call-and-response. Since then, first-person plural narrations have produced some fascinating fiction. There is Joseph Conrad's 1897 novella, The Nigger of the Narcissus, which gradually moves from third person to first-person plural as the bond among the seamen is established. In 1919, Yevgeny Zamyatin's dystopian novel We created a terrifying vision of collective identity: "we" not as communal bond but as government mandate, as the protagonist D-503 strives to assert the freedom of "I", the individual. The late mid-20th century saw a flurry of "we" narrated novels, including Tadeusz Borowski's This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (1959), narrated by a group of deportees at a concentration camp, where the group identity is strong, and yet cannot overcome the force of the "they" who push these victims towards death: "Our only strength is our great number the gas chambers cannot accommodate all of us."

Jeffrey Eugenides' debut novel The Virgin Suicides is one of the most famous examples of the first-person plural; it's narrated retrospectively by a group of neighbourhood boys fascinated by the suicides of five teenage sisters in their suburb. The boys' presence goes nearly unnoticed in the novel's action, until midway through when the boys are invited to a party the girls are finally, under the watchful eye of their parents, allowed to host. The choice of a collective voice shows the distance between the two groups the "them" of the girls and the "we" of the boys at a particularly vulnerable age. There is no conflict within the "we" in Euginedes' novel they report collectively on the Lisbon girls and there is little individualisation.

"Some of us on the boat were from Kyoto and were delicate and fair, and had lived our entire lives in darkened rooms at the back of the house. Some of us were from Nara, and prayed to our ancestors three times a day, and swore we could still hear the temple bells ringing. Some of us were farmers' daughters from Yamaguchi with thick wrists and broad shoulders who had never gone to bed after nine."

"Perhaps we had lost a brother or father to the sea, or a fiancé, or perhaps someone we loved had jumped into the water one unhappy morning and simply swum away, and now it was time for us, too, to move on."

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