Black Like Me Narrator:

First Person (Central Narrator):

This is basically a diary. Okay, we know that we don't write as nicely as this in our diaries, but this guy is a journalist. He writes his diary for a living. We write ours in order to remember our weird dreams.

Let's give you an example. Griffin writes:

The dark room. The streak of pale light through the transom. I woke to it several times, thinking it a long night. (8.1)

We'd write: "My room was dark when I woke up." That's why we're not literary geniuses. Sigh.

Like most diaries, it's written in the first-person, and Griffin is the central narrator. We see everything through his eyes, and that makes his whole experience a much more vivid story for us to read. It almost feels as if it was happening to us.

However, like any first person narrative, we see the story through the eyes of our narrator. Sometimes we have a trustworthy narrator, and sometimes we have an untrustworthy one.  This time, we have a foreign one. A white man pretending to be a black man for six weeks.

So we see the struggles of black people, but we see it through the eyes of someone who does not regularly have to experience those struggles. Griffin can quit his experiment at any time, and he does when he realizes, "Suddenly I knew I could not go back up to that room with its mottled mirror, its dead lightbulb and its blank negatives,"(9.266). But black people can't stop being black.

Also, Griffin is not an anthropologist or sociologist, so he doesn't have even scholarly knowledge to help him interpret his experience. All he's got to help him understand things are his experiences as a white man and the rumors that he's heard. So yeah, not so much help.

That perspective probably helped put his white readers at ease, but it's a good thing to think about when reading the book and understanding his experiences. Even though he's a journalist and this book is based on "facts," all narratives are colored by the experience of the people writing them.