The Lightning Thief Reading - Reader/Protag Comparison, Opinion of First Person

 

Anaklusmos / Riptide in the movies.

Riptide as imagined by the official TLT illustrator, John Rocco.

I'm nearly done with the book. As I'm going through I keep finding more details that I've forgotten about this book...

Prompts:
• Describe the similarities and differences between the main character and you.

• What special way did the author write (for example, flashbacks, told in firstperson, multiple voice narrative, foreshadowing, lost descriptive words thatcreate visual images in your mind, etc.)? Did that make reading it better orworse? Explain.

I find that I'm somewhat similar to Percy Jackson, the protagonist of the story. Both of us are teenagers, have black hair, and tan skin. Both of us also get distracted easily, and get bored as easily. Although it's not so pronounced in my case, we both have trouble reading. Impulsivity is a problem for the two of us, although it is once again less evident for me. Both of us also tend to be tempted to act on our emotions-- he almost got himself killed when he felt like fighting Ares, the god of war, actually. I might've felt or done the same.

There are more differences between Percy and I, though. Percy has ADHD and dyslexia while I do not. Percy has green eyes-- I have brown. He is also considered a delinquent, and is rather outgoing, both of which I am not. The biggest difference is that he is courageous, while I usually feel like crawling into a corner whenever someone starts getting angry, no matter how harmless they are. Oh, and he's half-god, but that is of fiction only, meaning I will never have that similarity with him. Although if I was, I would like to be a son of Athena or Hades...

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I'd like to talk about how Rick Riordan uses first person from Percy's perspective for the entire series.
Before I started reading this series, I read Harry Potter, which used a third person view in its writing, mainly focusing on Harry. Sometimes it would show the story from a different person's viewpoint, usually only at the beginning of a book in the series.
When I started reading TLT for the first time, I was rather shocked-- I've never read a story in first-person before. Although I like books, my collection of novels was rather small, and all of them were written in third-person. It was refreshing, though— I liked having a sarcastic juvenile delinquent narrate a death quest. I feel like the series would have a lot less spunk if Percy hadn't narrated.