Narrating The Self In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus Akinwumi Olutola Olafisayo

This paper is to review the main characteristics of first-person narrative. It is evident that Adichie successfully use this as a technique in the novel. First-person narrative is indicative of an emerging psychological individuation for it gains direct access into the mind of the narrator – her feelings, experiences and thoughts. The narrator is engaged in a form of extensive monologue which the reader overhears and has the initial advantage of gaining sympathy. Temporally, the time of the story is always in the present for the reader’s growing knowledge of the narrator is simultaneous with her own growing self-knowledge, both of which happen as the story unfolds. Also, whether the first-person narrator is just an observer or a major participant, we have to take the narrative tone, neutral or involved, she has adopted into consideration. In conclusion, first-person narrative affords the author the rhetoric of ironic distance, between the real author and the narrator, between that narrator and the other characters, and between them and the reader.