Point of view (literature)
Encyclopedia
The narrative mode is the set of methods the author
of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, or musical story
uses to convey the plot to the audience
. Narration, the process of presenting the narrative, occurs because of the narrative mode. It encompasses several overlapping areas of concern, most importantly narrative point-of-view, which determines through whose perspective the story is viewed and narrative voice, which determines a set of consistent features regarding the way through which the story is communicated to the audience.
The narrator
may be a fictive person devised by the author as a stand-alone entity, or may even be a character. The narrator is considered participant if an actual character in the story, and nonparticipant if only an implied character, or a sort of omniscient or semi-omniscient being who does not take part in the story but only relates it to the audience.
Ability to use the different points of view is one measure of a person's writing skill. The writing mark schemes
used for National Curriculum assessment
s in England
reflect this: they encourage the awarding of marks for the use of viewpoint as part of a wider judgment.
The narrative mode encompasses not only who tells the story, but also how the story is described or expressed (for example, by using stream of consciousness or unreliable narration
).
Narrative point of view differs from similar terms and concepts such as perspective, viewpoint, or the point-of-view of a camera. Perspective refers to a particular attitude toward or a way of regarding something; when discussed in fiction writing, perspective means the subjective perception of a character. Viewpoint refers to the position from which something is viewed, and point-of-view in film refers to the view captured by the camera’s optics. The viewpoint of a person or the point-of-view of a camera is not analogous to narrative point of view in literature.
who is also a character
within the story, so that the narrator reveals the plot by referring to this viewpoint character as "I" (or, when plural, "we"). Oftentimes, the first-person narrative is used as a way to directly convey the deeply internal, otherwise unspoken thoughts of the narrator. Frequently, the narrator's story revolves around him-/herself as the protagonist
and allows this protagonist/narrator character's inner thoughts to be conveyed openly to the audience, even if not to any of the other characters. It also allows that character to be further developed through his/her own style in telling the story. First-person narrations may be told like third-person ones, with a person experiencing the story without being aware that they are actually conveying their experiences to an audience; on the other hand, the narrator may be conscious of telling the story to a given audience, perhaps at a given place and time, for a given reason. In extreme cases, the first-person narration may be told as a story within a story
, with the narrator appearing as a character in the story. The first-person narrator also may or may not be the focal character
.
As aforementioned, the first-person narrator is always a character within his/her own story (whether the protagonist or not) and this viewpoint character takes actions, makes judgments and has opinions and biases, therefore, not always allowing the audience to be able to comprehend some of the other character's thoughts, feelings, or understandings as much as this one character. In this case, the narrator gives and withholds information based on his/her own viewing of events. It is an important task for the reader to determine as much as possible about the character of the narrator in order to decide what "really" happens.
Example:
In very rare cases, stories are told in first person plural, that is, using "we" rather than "I". Examples are the short stories Twenty-Six Men and a Girl
by Maxim Gorky
and A Rose for Emily
by William Faulkner
, and the novels Anthem
by Ayn Rand
, The Virgin Suicides
by Jeffrey Eugenides
, During the Reign of the Queen of Persia by Joan Chase
, Our Kind by Kate Walbert
, I, Robot
by Isaac Asimov
, and Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris
.
The narrator can be the protagonist
(e.g., Gulliver
in Gulliver's Travels
), someone very close to him who is privy to his thoughts and actions (Dr. Watson in Sherlock Holmes
), or an ancillary character who has little to do with the action of the story (such as Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby
). Narrators can report others' narratives at one or more removes. These are called 'frame narrators': examples are Mr. Lockwood, the narrator in Wuthering Heights
by Emily Brontë
, and the unnamed narrator in Heart of Darkness
by Joseph Conrad
.
In autobiographical fiction
, the first person narrator is the character of the author (with varying degrees of accuracy). The narrator is still distinct from the author and must behave like any other character and any other first person narrator. Examples of this kind of narrator include Jim Carroll
in The Basketball Diaries
and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
in Timequake
(in this case, the first-person narrator is also the author). In some cases, the narrator is writing a book — "the book in your hands" — therefore it has most of the powers and knowledge of the author. Examples include The Name of the Rose
by Umberto Eco
, and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
by Mark Haddon
.
A rare form of first person, is the first person omniscient, in which the narrator is a character in the story, but also knows the thoughts and feelings of all the other characters. It can seem like third person omniscient at times. Two notable examples are The Book Thief
by Markus Zusak
, where the narrator is Death
, and The Lovely Bones
by Alice Sebold
, where a young girl, after having been raped and murdered, watches from Heaven
how her family struggles to cope with her disappearance. Typically, however, the narrator restricts the events relayed in the narrative to those that it could reasonably have knowledge of.
by Iain Banks
.
In letters and greeting cards, the second-person narrative mode is often used in a non-fictional atmosphere.
Perhaps the most prominent example of this mode in contemporary literature is Jay McInerney
's Bright Lights, Big City
. In this novel, the second-person point of view is intended to create an intense sense of intimacy between the narrator and the reader, causing the reader to feel implicit in and powerless against a plot that leads him, blindly, through his (the reader’s and the narrator’s) own destruction and redemption:
Other notable examples of the second-person narrative mode include Italo Calvino
's If on a winter's night a traveler
, and Tom Robbins
' Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas
. As well, Damage by A.M. Jenkins uses the second-person to show how distant the depressed main character has become from himself. And the narrator of Joseph Olshan
's novel Nightswimmer intimately explains a story that his lover only partially understands. Science fiction author Charles Stross
uses a multiple second-person narrative mode in his novels Halting State
and Rule 34
. The second-person has also been used in many short stories.
Second-person narration can be a difficult style to manage. The technique can also be used effectively to place the reader in unfamiliar, disturbing, or exciting situations. For example, in his novel Complicity, Iain Banks
uses the second-person in the chapters dealing with the actions of a murderer.
One notable example of the use of second-person narration is the Choose Your Own Adventure
series of children's books, in which the reader actually makes decisions and jumps around the book accordingly. Similarly, most interactive fiction
is in the second person.
An even more unusual, but potentially stylish version of second person narration takes the form of a series of imperative
statements with the implied subject "you", as in this example from Lorrie Moore
's "How to Become a Writer":
), or "you" (second-person). In third-person narrative, it is necessary that the narrator be merely an unspecified entity
or uninvolved person that conveys the story, but not a character of any kind within the story being told. Third-person singular (he/she) is overwhelmingly the most common type of third-person narrative, although there have been successful uses of the third-person plural (they), as in Maxine Swann
's short story "Flower Children". Even more common, however, is to see singular and plural used together in one story, at different times, depending upon the number of people being referred to at a given moment in the plot. Sometimes in third-person narratives, a character would refer to himself in the third-person e.g., "(Character name) would like to come with you".
The third-person modes are usually categorized along two axes. The first is the subjectivity/objectivity axis, with "subjective" narration describing one or more character's feelings and thoughts, while "objective" narration does not describe the feelings or thoughts of any characters. The second axis is between "omniscient" and "limited", a distinction that refers to the knowledge available to the narrator. An omniscient narrator has omniscient knowledge of time, people, places and events; a limited narrator, in contrast, may know absolutely everything about a single character and every piece of knowledge in that character's mind, but it is "limited" to that character—that is, it cannot describe things unknown to the focal character.
The first aspect of third person point of view is to understand the spectrum (or sliding scale) between objective and subjective. A narrator staying on the objective end of this spectrum can only describe the exterior world and cannot relate the thoughts, feelings, or inner workings of any character’s minds. A narrator staying on the subjective end of this spectrum tells the story exclusively from the perspective(s) of the character(s) and cannot relate any of the exterior objective world.
Traditionally, mainstream fiction with third person narration operates near the middle of the subjective/objective spectrum, alternating between objective and subjective reality and also offering alternating perspectives of the main characters. This allows the narrator to present both the objective reality and the subjective perspectives of the various characters on that reality. Given this information, the reader can then judge for themselves (without being told outright by the narrator) whether the character is a hero, fool, or other type based on the way they perceive and interact with the established reality.
The second aspect of third person point of view is to identify whether the narrator is limited or omniscient. There is no sliding scale between these two voices, no semi-omniscient or semi-limited. Within literature, limited or omniscient are considered absolutes.
The third person limited narrator is limited to knowing about one main character including the objective sphere of things that influence or have an effect on that character’s life. The limited narrator cannot leave the main character and relate the subjective inner workings of any other character in the story. This limitation is absolute. If a third person narrator seems limited but then jumps away from the main character to tell a different character’s thoughts or perspectives, they have just broken out of limited voice and shown themselves to be a third person omniscient narrator.
The third person omniscient narrator presumably knows all the objective occurrences and subjective perspectives of the entire universe where the story takes place, but they tell only the elements necessary to the story. A common mistake in understanding third person narration is to think that a narrator cannot know everything because the writer cannot know everything. However, the narrator is not the writer and vice-versa. The idea of omniscience is a convention in literature — the third person omniscient dwells within the collective unconscious and the creative writer taps into that to tell stories. Naturally, any being that is omniscient is supernatural, or God-like, and must hold back information due to the constraints of time and the potential to overwhelm the reader.
For this reason, a third person omniscient narrator may tell a story to children or young adults in a way that might feel limited to an adult reader, but this does not make them a third person limited narrator. One common device in young adult novels (such as the Harry Potter series) is to alternate perspectives of characters in different chapters. This is not a change of point of view; the same narrator is still telling the story. For the sake of the young reader, the writer made the narrative jump to an alternate perspective at a chapter break.
Many mainstream third person novels employ an omniscient narrator that delves into the thoughts and feelings of multiple characters, alternating perspectives in some form. Given multiple perspectives and objective descriptions of the reality, the complexities of big picture storytelling are more fully realized in third person narration than any other voice.
Understanding these ideas about limited and omniscient narrative voice being absolutes while objective and subjective occur on a spectrum can lead to interesting debates and discussions about point of view in literature. For instance, when looking at a complex novel such as Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion, a case can be made that the narration is third person omniscient and becomes so subjective that the story is ultimately told in alternating first person perspectives of the primary characters. The giveaway for this is that the book starts in objective third person omniscient and then moves into the minds of the characters before becoming first person. If an omniscient narrator knows everything, they would know the first person perspectives of the characters and be able to narrate following the rules for that voice.
series, a switch of viewpoint is done only at chapter boundaries. Omniscient point of view is also referred to as alternating point of view, because the story sometimes alternates between characters. Often, a narrator using the first person will try to be more objective by also employing the third person for important action scenes, especially those in which he/she is not directly involved or in scenes where he/she is not present to have viewed the events in first person. This mode is found in the novel The Poisonwood Bible
.
Epistolary novel
s, which were very common in the early years of the novel, generally consist of a series of letters written by different characters, and necessarily switching when the writer changes; the classic books Frankenstein
by Mary Shelley
, Dracula
by Abraham "Bram" Stoker
and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde take this approach. Sometimes, though, they may all be letters from one character, such as C. S. Lewis
' Screwtape Letters
and Helen Fielding
's Bridget Jones's Diary
. Robert Louis Stevenson
's Treasure Island
switches between third and first person, as do Charles Dickens
's Bleak House
and Vladimir Nabokov
's The Gift. Many of William Faulkner
's take a series of first-person points of view. E.L. Konigsburg's novella The View from Saturday
uses flashback
s to alternate between third person and first person throughout the book; as does Edith Wharton's novel Ethan Frome
. After the First Death
, by Robert Cormier
, a novel about a fictional school bus hijacking in the late seventies, also switches from first to third person narrative using different characters. The novel The Death of Artemio Cruz
, by Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes
, switches between the three persons from one chapter to the next, even though all refer to the same protagonist
. The novel Dreaming in Cuban
, by Cristina García
, alternates between third person limited and first person depending on the generation of the speaker; the grandchildren recount events in first person while the parents and grandparent are shown in third person limited.
and As I Lay Dying, the character Offred's often fragmented thoughts in Margaret Atwood
's The Handmaid's Tale
, and the development of the narrator's nightmarish experience in Queen
's hit song, Bohemian Rhapsody
.
: examples of supporting viewpoint characters include Doctor Watson
, Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird
, and The Great Gatsby
's Nick Carraway.
Examples include "Chief" Bromden in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey, Holden Caulfield
in the novel "The Catcher In The Rye
", Dr. James Sheppard in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie, and Humbert Humbert in the novel Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov.
A naive narrator is one who is so ignorant and inexperienced that he/she actually exposes the faults and issues of his/her world. It is used particularly in satire
, in situations where the user can draw more inferences about the narrator's environment than the narrator. Child narrators can also fall under this category.
's Frankenstein
which is a single story written in a letter. Another is Bram Stoker
's Dracula
, which tells the story in a series of diary entries and newspaper clippings. Les Liaisons dangereuses
(Dangerous Liaisons) by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
is again made up of the correspondence between the main characters, most notably the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont. Langston Hughes does the same thing in a shorter form in his story "Passing," which consists of a young man's letter to his mother.
) as in the first-person mode (though still giving personal descriptions using "he", "she", "it", and "they", but not "I"). This is almost always the main character—e.g., Gabriel in Joyce
's The Dead
, Nathaniel Hawthorne
's Young Goodman Brown, or the elderly fisherman in Hemingway
's The Old Man and the Sea
. Certain third-person omniscient modes are also classifiable as "third person, subjective" modes that switch between the thoughts, feelings, etc. of all the characters.
This style, in both its limited and omniscient variants, became the most popular narrative perspective during the twentieth century. In contrast to the broad, sweeping perspectives seen in many nineteenth-century novels, third-person subjective is sometimes called the "over the shoulder" perspective; the narrator only describes events perceived and information known by a character. At its narrowest and most subjective scope, the story reads as though the viewpoint character were narrating it; dramatically this is very similar to the first person, in that it allows in-depth revelation of the protagonist's personality, but it uses third-person grammar. Some writers will shift perspective from one viewpoint character to another.
The focal character
, protagonist
, antagonist
, or some other character's thoughts are revealed through the narrator. The reader learns the events of the narrative through the perceptions of the chosen character.
, unbiased point of view. Often the narrator is self-dehumanized in order to make the narrative more neutral; this type of narrative mode, outside of fiction, is often employed by newspaper articles, biographical documents, and scientific journals. This point of view can be described as a "fly on the wall" or "camera lens" approach that can only record the observable actions, but does not interpret these actions or relay what thoughts are going through the minds of the characters. Works of fiction that use this style put a great deal of emphasis on characters acting out their feelings in an observable way. Internal thoughts, if expressed, are given voice through an aside or soliloquy. While this approach does not allow the author to reveal the unexpressed thoughts and feelings of the characters, it does allow the author to reveal information that not all or any of the characters may be aware of. A typical example of this so called camera-eye perspective is e.g. Hills Like White Elephants
by Ernest Hemingway
.
The third-person objective is preferred in most pieces that are deliberately trying to take a neutral or unbiased view, like in many newspaper articles. It is also called the third-person dramatic, because the narrator (like the audience of a drama) is neutral and ineffective toward the progression of the plot — merely an uninvolved onlooker. It was also used around the mid-twentieth century by French novelists writing in the nouveau roman tradition.
, Leo Tolstoy
, Charles Dickens
, and George Eliot
. This is a tale told from the point of view of a storyteller who plays no part in the story but knows all the facts, including the characters' thoughts. It sometimes even takes a subjective approach. One advantage of omniscience is that this mode enhances the sense of objective reliability (i.e. truthfulness) of the plot. The third-person omniscient narrator is the least capable of being unreliable—although the omniscient narrator can have its own personality, offering judgments and opinions on the behavior of the characters.
In addition to reinforcing the sense of the narrator as reliable (and thus of the story as true), the main advantage of this mode is that it is eminently suited to telling huge, sweeping, epic stories, and/or complicated stories involving numerous characters. The disadvantage of this mode is that it can create more distance between the audience and the story, and that—when used in conjunction with a sweeping, epic "cast of thousands" story—characterization is more limited, which can reduce the reader's identification with or attachment to the characters. A classic example of both the advantages and disadvantages of this mode is J. R. R. Tolkien
's The Lord of the Rings
series. However, as demonstrated by Isabel Allende
's The House of the Spirits
, this mode can capture huge sweeping stories (such as the political history of Chile, a major element of the novel) while also maintaining the reader's intimacy with certain key characters . Ann Patchett
's Bel Canto
also illustrates how this mode can be used to tell a complicated story involving dozens of characters while maintaining intimacy with the key characters .
Some make the distinction between the third-person omniscient and the universal omniscient, the difference being that in universal omniscient, the narrator reveals information that the characters do not have. This is also called "Little Did He Know" writing, as in, "Little did he know he'd be dead by morning." Usually, the universal omniscient enforces the idea of the narrator being unconnected to the events of the story.
Some more modern examples are Lemony Snicket
, James Eugene Robinson in his novel, The Flower of Grass, and Philip Pullman
. In some unusual cases, the reliability and impartiality of the narrator may in fact be as suspect
as in the third person limited.
of the story; whether in the past, present, or future.
. (e.g. "They drive happily. They have found their way and are now preparing to celebrate.") In English this tense, known as the "historical present
", is more common in spontaneous conversational narratives than in written literature.
feel. (e.g. "They will drive happily. They will find their way and will prepare to celebrate.")
Along with exposition
, argumentation, and description
, narration (broadly defined) is one of four rhetorical modes
of discourse. In the context of rhetorical modes, the purpose of narration is to tell a story or to narrate an event or series of events. Narrative may exist in a variety of forms: biographies, anecdotes, short stories, novels. In this context, all written fiction may be viewed as narration.
Narrowly defined, narration is the fiction-writing mode whereby the narrator is communicating directly to the reader. But if the broad definition of narration includes all written fiction, and the narrow definition is limited merely to that which is directly communicated to the reader, then what comprises the rest of written fiction? The remainder of written fiction would be in the form of any of the other fiction-writing modes. Narration, as a fiction-writing mode, is a matter for discussion among fiction writers and writing coaches.
is presented. Although second-person perspectives are occasionally used, the most commonly encountered are first and third person. Third person omniscient specifies a viewpoint in which readers are provided with information not available to characters within the story; without this qualifier, readers may or may not have such information.
In movies
and video games first- and third-person describe camera viewpoints
. These have nothing to do with linguistic persons. The first-person is from a character's own perspective, and the third-person is the more familiar, "general" camera showing a scene. A so-called second-person may also be used to showing a main character from a secondary character's perspective.
For example, in a horror film
, the first-person perspective of an antagonist
could become a second-person perspective on a potential victim's actions. A third-person shot of the two characters could be used to show the narrowing distance between them.
In video games, a first-person perspective is used most often in the first-person shooter
genre, such as in Doom, or in simulations (racing games, flight simulation games, and such). Third-person perspectives on characters are typically used in all other games. Since the arrival of 3D computer graphics
in games it is often possible for the player to switch between first- and third-person perspectives at will; this is usually done to improve spatial awareness, but can also improve the accuracy of weapons use in generally third-person games such as the Metal Gear Solid
franchise.
Text-based interactive fiction
conventionally has descriptions written in the second person (though exceptions exist), telling the character what he is seeing and doing, such as Zork
. This practice is also encountered occasionally in text-based segments of graphical games.
Author
An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...
of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, or musical story
Narrative
A narrative is a constructive format that describes a sequence of non-fictional or fictional events. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to recount", and is related to the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled"...
uses to convey the plot to the audience
Audience
An audience is a group of people who participate in a show or encounter a work of art, literature , theatre, music or academics in any medium...
. Narration, the process of presenting the narrative, occurs because of the narrative mode. It encompasses several overlapping areas of concern, most importantly narrative point-of-view, which determines through whose perspective the story is viewed and narrative voice, which determines a set of consistent features regarding the way through which the story is communicated to the audience.
The narrator
Narrator
A narrator is, within any story , the fictional or non-fictional, personal or impersonal entity who tells the story to the audience. When the narrator is also a character within the story, he or she is sometimes known as the viewpoint character. The narrator is one of three entities responsible for...
may be a fictive person devised by the author as a stand-alone entity, or may even be a character. The narrator is considered participant if an actual character in the story, and nonparticipant if only an implied character, or a sort of omniscient or semi-omniscient being who does not take part in the story but only relates it to the audience.
Ability to use the different points of view is one measure of a person's writing skill. The writing mark schemes
Marking scheme
A marking scheme is a set of criteria used in assessing student learning.- Sample marking scheme :This is an example of a marking scheme for a presentation assignment* Presentation...
used for National Curriculum assessment
National Curriculum assessment
National Curriculum assessments are a series of educational assessments, colloquially known as Sats or SATs, used to assess the attainment of children attending maintained schools in England...
s in England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
reflect this: they encourage the awarding of marks for the use of viewpoint as part of a wider judgment.
The narrative mode encompasses not only who tells the story, but also how the story is described or expressed (for example, by using stream of consciousness or unreliable narration
Unreliable narrator
An unreliable narrator is a narrator, whether in literature, film, or theatre, whose credibility has been seriously compromised. The term was coined in 1961 by Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction. This narrative mode is one that can be developed by an author for a number of reasons, usually...
).
Narrative Point of View
Narrative point of view in the creative writing of fiction describes the narrator's position in relation to the story being told.Narrative point of view differs from similar terms and concepts such as perspective, viewpoint, or the point-of-view of a camera. Perspective refers to a particular attitude toward or a way of regarding something; when discussed in fiction writing, perspective means the subjective perception of a character. Viewpoint refers to the position from which something is viewed, and point-of-view in film refers to the view captured by the camera’s optics. The viewpoint of a person or the point-of-view of a camera is not analogous to narrative point of view in literature.
First-person view
In a first-person narrative the story is relayed by a narratorNarrator
A narrator is, within any story , the fictional or non-fictional, personal or impersonal entity who tells the story to the audience. When the narrator is also a character within the story, he or she is sometimes known as the viewpoint character. The narrator is one of three entities responsible for...
who is also a character
Character (arts)
A character is the representation of a person in a narrative work of art . Derived from the ancient Greek word kharaktêr , the earliest use in English, in this sense, dates from the Restoration, although it became widely used after its appearance in Tom Jones in 1749. From this, the sense of...
within the story, so that the narrator reveals the plot by referring to this viewpoint character as "I" (or, when plural, "we"). Oftentimes, the first-person narrative is used as a way to directly convey the deeply internal, otherwise unspoken thoughts of the narrator. Frequently, the narrator's story revolves around him-/herself as the protagonist
Protagonist
A protagonist is the main character of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, or musical narrative, around whom the events of the narrative's plot revolve and with whom the audience is intended to most identify...
and allows this protagonist/narrator character's inner thoughts to be conveyed openly to the audience, even if not to any of the other characters. It also allows that character to be further developed through his/her own style in telling the story. First-person narrations may be told like third-person ones, with a person experiencing the story without being aware that they are actually conveying their experiences to an audience; on the other hand, the narrator may be conscious of telling the story to a given audience, perhaps at a given place and time, for a given reason. In extreme cases, the first-person narration may be told as a story within a story
Story within a story
A story within a story, also rendered story-within-a-story, is a literary device in which one narrative is presented during the action of another narrative. Mise en abyme is the French term for a similar literary device...
, with the narrator appearing as a character in the story. The first-person narrator also may or may not be the focal character
Focal character
In any narrative, the focal character is the character on whom the audience is meant to place the majority of their interest and attention. He or she is almost always also the protagonist of the story; however, in cases where the "focal character" and "protagonist" are separate, the focal...
.
As aforementioned, the first-person narrator is always a character within his/her own story (whether the protagonist or not) and this viewpoint character takes actions, makes judgments and has opinions and biases, therefore, not always allowing the audience to be able to comprehend some of the other character's thoughts, feelings, or understandings as much as this one character. In this case, the narrator gives and withholds information based on his/her own viewing of events. It is an important task for the reader to determine as much as possible about the character of the narrator in order to decide what "really" happens.
Example:
- "I could picture it. I have a habit of imagining the conversations between my friends. We went out to the Cafe Napolitain to have an aperitif and watch the evening crowd on the Boulevard." from The Sun Also RisesThe Sun Also RisesThe Sun Also Rises is a 1926 novel written by American author Ernest Hemingway about a group of American and British expatriates who travel from Paris to the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona to watch the running of the bulls and the bullfights. An early and enduring modernist novel, it received...
by Ernest HemingwayErnest HemingwayErnest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
. The narrator is protagonist Jake Barnes.
In very rare cases, stories are told in first person plural, that is, using "we" rather than "I". Examples are the short stories Twenty-Six Men and a Girl
Twenty-six Men and a Girl
"Twenty-six Men and a Girl" is a short story written by the Russian writer Maxim Gorky in 1899, and is one of his most famous.It is a pioneering story of Social Realism , and is a story of lost ideals. Twenty-six men labor in a cellar, making kringles in an effective prison, looked down on by all...
by Maxim Gorky
Maxim Gorky
Alexei Maximovich Peshkov , primarily known as Maxim Gorky , was a Russian and Soviet author, a founder of the Socialist Realism literary method and a political activist.-Early years:...
and A Rose for Emily
A Rose for Emily
"A Rose for Emily" is a short story by American author William Faulkner first published in the April 30, 1930 issue of Forum. This story takes place in Faulkner's fictional city, Jefferson, Mississippi, in the fictional county of Yoknapatawpha County...
by William Faulkner
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
, and the novels Anthem
Anthem
The term anthem means either a specific form of Anglican church music , or more generally, a song of celebration, usually acting as a symbol for a distinct group of people, as in the term "national anthem" or "sports anthem".-Etymology:The word is derived from the Greek via Old English , a word...
by Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand was a Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter. She is known for her two best-selling novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and for developing a philosophical system she called Objectivism....
, The Virgin Suicides
The Virgin Suicides
The Virgin Suicides is the 1993 debut novel by American writer Jeffrey Eugenides. The story, which is set in Grosse Pointe, Michigan during the 1970s, centers on the suicides of five sisters. The Lisbon girls' suicides fascinate their community as their neighbors struggle to find an explanation for...
by Jeffrey Eugenides
Jeffrey Eugenides
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and short story writer. Eugenides is most known for his first two novels, The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex . His novel The Marriage Plot was published in October, 2011.-Life and career:Eugenides was born in Detroit, Michigan,...
, During the Reign of the Queen of Persia by Joan Chase
Joan Chase
-Life:She moved from town to town in Ohio throughout her childhood.She graduated from the University of Maryland magna cum laude. From 1980 to 1984, she was an assistant director of the Ragdale Foundation.She is a member of PEN.-Awards:...
, Our Kind by Kate Walbert
Kate Walbert
Kate Walbert is an American writer. She lives in New York with her family.Walbert received her MA in English from New York University. She teaches creative writing at Yale University...
, I, Robot
I, Robot
I, Robot is a collection of nine science fiction short stories by Isaac Asimov, first published by Gnome Press in 1950 in an edition of 5,000 copies. The stories originally appeared in the American magazines Super Science Stories and Astounding Science Fiction between 1940 and 1950. The stories are...
by Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov was an American author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books. Asimov was one of the most prolific writers of all time, having written or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 90,000...
, and Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris
Joshua Ferris
Joshua Ferris is an American author best known for his debut 2007 novel Then We Came to the End. The book is a comedy about the American workplace, told in the first-person plural...
.
The narrator can be the protagonist
Protagonist
A protagonist is the main character of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, or musical narrative, around whom the events of the narrative's plot revolve and with whom the audience is intended to most identify...
(e.g., Gulliver
Lemuel Gulliver
Lemuel Gulliver is the protagonist and narrator of Gulliver's Travels, a novel written by Jonathan Swift, first published in 1726.-In Gulliver's Travels:...
in Gulliver's Travels
Gulliver's Travels
Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships, better known simply as Gulliver's Travels , is a novel by Anglo-Irish writer and clergyman Jonathan Swift that is both a satire on human nature and a parody of...
), someone very close to him who is privy to his thoughts and actions (Dr. Watson in Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes is a fictional detective created by Scottish author and physician Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The fantastic London-based "consulting detective", Holmes is famous for his astute logical reasoning, his ability to take almost any disguise, and his use of forensic science skills to solve...
), or an ancillary character who has little to do with the action of the story (such as Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby is a novel by the American author F. Scott Fitzgerald. First published in1925, it is set on Long Island's North Shore and in New York City from spring to autumn of 1922....
). Narrators can report others' narratives at one or more removes. These are called 'frame narrators': examples are Mr. Lockwood, the narrator in Wuthering Heights
Wuthering Heights
Wuthering Heights is a novel by Emily Brontë published in 1847. It was her only novel and written between December 1845 and July 1846. It remained unpublished until July 1847 and was not printed until December after the success of her sister Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre...
by Emily Brontë
Emily Brontë
Emily Jane Brontë 30 July 1818 – 19 December 1848) was an English novelist and poet, best remembered for her only novel, Wuthering Heights, now considered a classic of English literature. Emily was the third eldest of the four surviving Brontë siblings, between the youngest Anne and her brother...
, and the unnamed narrator in Heart of Darkness
Heart of Darkness
Heart of Darkness is a novella written by Joseph Conrad. Before its 1903 publication, it appeared as a three-part series in Blackwood's Magazine. It was classified by the Modern Library website editors as one of the "100 best novels" and part of the Western canon.The story centres on Charles...
by Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad was a Polish-born English novelist.Conrad is regarded as one of the great novelists in English, although he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties...
.
In autobiographical fiction
Autobiography
An autobiography is a book about the life of a person, written by that person.-Origin of the term:...
, the first person narrator is the character of the author (with varying degrees of accuracy). The narrator is still distinct from the author and must behave like any other character and any other first person narrator. Examples of this kind of narrator include Jim Carroll
Jim Carroll
James Dennis "Jim" Carroll was an author, poet, autobiographer, and punk musician. Carroll was best known for his 1978 autobiographical work The Basketball Diaries, which was made into the 1995 film of the same name, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Carroll.-Biography:Carroll was born to a...
in The Basketball Diaries
The Basketball Diaries
The Basketball Diaries is a 1978 memoir written by author and musician Jim Carroll. It is an edited collection of the diaries he kept between the ages of twelve and sixteen...
and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was a 20th century American writer. His works such as Cat's Cradle , Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions blend satire, gallows humor and science fiction. He was known for his humanist beliefs and was honorary president of the American Humanist Association.-Early...
in Timequake
Timequake
Timequake is a semi-autobiographical work by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. published in 1997. Vonnegut described the novel as a "stew", in which he alternates between summarizing a novel he had been struggling with for a number of years, and waxing nostalgic about various events in his life.-Plot...
(in this case, the first-person narrator is also the author). In some cases, the narrator is writing a book — "the book in your hands" — therefore it has most of the powers and knowledge of the author. Examples include The Name of the Rose
The Name of the Rose
The Name of the Rose is the first novel by Italian author Umberto Eco. It is a historical murder mystery set in an Italian monastery in the year 1327, an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory...
by Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco Knight Grand Cross is an Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist, best known for his novel The Name of the Rose , an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory...
, and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a 2003 novel by British writer Mark Haddon. It won the 2003 Whitbread Book of the Year and the 2004 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book...
by Mark Haddon
Mark Haddon
Mark Haddon is an English novelist and poet, best known for his 2003 novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.- Life and work :...
.
A rare form of first person, is the first person omniscient, in which the narrator is a character in the story, but also knows the thoughts and feelings of all the other characters. It can seem like third person omniscient at times. Two notable examples are The Book Thief
The Book Thief
The Book Thief is a novel by Australian author Markus Zusak. Narrated by Death, the book is set in Nazi Germany It describes a young girl's relationship with her foster parents, Hans and Rosa, and the other residents of their neighborhood, and a Jewish fist-fighter who hides in her home during the...
by Markus Zusak
Markus Zusak
Markus Zusak is an Australian author. He is best known for his books The Book Thief and The Messenger , which have been international bestsellers.- Career :...
, where the narrator is Death
Death
Death is the permanent termination of the biological functions that sustain a living organism. Phenomena which commonly bring about death include old age, predation, malnutrition, disease, and accidents or trauma resulting in terminal injury....
, and The Lovely Bones
The Lovely Bones
The Lovely Bones is a 2002 novel by Alice Sebold. It is the story of a teenage girl who, after being raped and murdered, watches from her personal Heaven as her family and friends struggle to move on with their lives while she comes to terms with her own death. The novel received much critical...
by Alice Sebold
Alice Sebold
Alice Sebold is an American novelist. She has published three books: Lucky , The Lovely Bones and The Almost Moon .-Early life:...
, where a young girl, after having been raped and murdered, watches from Heaven
Heaven
Heaven, the Heavens or Seven Heavens, is a common religious cosmological or metaphysical term for the physical or transcendent place from which heavenly beings originate, are enthroned or inhabit...
how her family struggles to cope with her disappearance. Typically, however, the narrator restricts the events relayed in the narrative to those that it could reasonably have knowledge of.
Second-person view
Probably the rarest mode in literature (though quite common in song lyrics) is the second-person narrative mode, in which the narrator refers to one of the characters as "you", therefore making the audience member feel as if he or she is a character within the story. The second-person narrative mode is often paired with the first-person narrative mode in which the narrator makes emotional comparisons between the thoughts, actions, and feelings of "you" versus "I". Often the narrator is therefore also a character in his or her story, in which case it would technically still be employing the first-person narrative mode; an example of this form is A Song of StoneA Song of Stone
-Plot introduction:A novel about an aristocrat's experience of civil war.-Plot summary:Abel and Morgan live in a small castle in an indeterminate place and time of civil war. They decide to abandon their home and join the refugees seeking safety. A group of irregulars led by "The Lieutenant" stops...
by Iain Banks
Iain Banks
Iain Banks is a Scottish writer. He writes mainstream fiction under the name Iain Banks, and science fiction as Iain M. Banks, including the initial of his adopted middle name Menzies...
.
In letters and greeting cards, the second-person narrative mode is often used in a non-fictional atmosphere.
Perhaps the most prominent example of this mode in contemporary literature is Jay McInerney
Jay McInerney
John Barrett McInerney Jr. is an American writer. His novels include Bright Lights, Big City; Ransom; Story of My Life; Brightness Falls; and The Last of the Savages...
's Bright Lights, Big City
Bright Lights, Big City (novel)
Bright Lights, Big City is an American novel by Jay McInerney, published by Vintage Books on August 12, 1984.- Plot :It is written about a character's time spent caught up in, and notably escaping from, the mid-1980s New York City fast lane. It is one of the few well-known English-language novels...
. In this novel, the second-person point of view is intended to create an intense sense of intimacy between the narrator and the reader, causing the reader to feel implicit in and powerless against a plot that leads him, blindly, through his (the reader’s and the narrator’s) own destruction and redemption:
- "You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy. You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge. All might become clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder. Then again, it might not. A small voice inside you insists that this epidemic lack of clarity is a result of too much of that already."
Other notable examples of the second-person narrative mode include Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy , the Cosmicomics collection of short stories , and the novels Invisible Cities and If on a winter's night a traveler .Lionised in Britain and the United States,...
's If on a winter's night a traveler
If on a winter's night a traveler
If on a winter's night a traveler is a 1979 novel by the Italian writer Italo Calvino. The narrative is about a reader trying to read a book called If on a winter's night a traveler. Every odd-numbered chapter is in the second person, and tells the reader what he is doing in preparation for...
, and Tom Robbins
Tom Robbins
Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins (born July 22, 1936 is an American author. His best-selling novels are serio-comic, often wildly poetic stories with a strong social and philosophical undercurrent, an irreverent bent, and scenes extrapolated from...
' Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas
Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas
One of Tom Robbins' less well-known novels, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas was published in 1994 by Bantam Books. Like Robbins' other books, the plot involves an eclectic mix of characters and complicated scenarios, and mixes the mundane with the mysterious, in the form of the Sirius mysteries and...
. As well, Damage by A.M. Jenkins uses the second-person to show how distant the depressed main character has become from himself. And the narrator of Joseph Olshan
Joseph Olshan
Joseph Olshan is an award-winning American novelist.He is the author of eight novels, most recently, The Conversion . His first novel, Clara's Heart, won the Times/Jonathan Cape Young Writers' Competition and went on to be made into a feature film starring Whoopi Goldberg in 1988...
's novel Nightswimmer intimately explains a story that his lover only partially understands. Science fiction author Charles Stross
Charles Stross
Charles David George "Charlie" Stross is a British writer of science fiction, Lovecraftian horror and fantasy. He was born in Leeds.Stross specialises in hard science fiction and space opera...
uses a multiple second-person narrative mode in his novels Halting State
Halting State
Halting State is a novel by Charles Stross, published in the United States on October 2, 2007 and in the UK in January, 2008. Stross has said that it is "a thriller set in the software houses that write multiplayer games". The plot centres around a bank robbery in a virtual world. It features...
and Rule 34
Rule 34 (novel)
Rule 34 is a near-future science fiction novel by Charles Stross. It is a loose sequel to Halting State, and was released on July 5 and 7th , 2011. The title is a reference to the meme Rule 34 of the Internet, a meme which states that "If it exists, there is porn of it...
. The second-person has also been used in many short stories.
Second-person narration can be a difficult style to manage. The technique can also be used effectively to place the reader in unfamiliar, disturbing, or exciting situations. For example, in his novel Complicity, Iain Banks
Iain Banks
Iain Banks is a Scottish writer. He writes mainstream fiction under the name Iain Banks, and science fiction as Iain M. Banks, including the initial of his adopted middle name Menzies...
uses the second-person in the chapters dealing with the actions of a murderer.
One notable example of the use of second-person narration is the Choose Your Own Adventure
Choose Your Own Adventure
Choose Your Own Adventure is a series of children's gamebooks where each story is written from a second-person point of view, with the reader assuming the role of the protagonist and making choices that determine the main character's actions and the plot's outcome. The series was based on a...
series of children's books, in which the reader actually makes decisions and jumps around the book accordingly. Similarly, most interactive fiction
Interactive fiction
Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, describes software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives and as video games. In common usage, the term refers to text...
is in the second person.
An even more unusual, but potentially stylish version of second person narration takes the form of a series of imperative
Imperative mood
The imperative mood expresses commands or requests as a grammatical mood. These commands or requests urge the audience to act a certain way. It also may signal a prohibition, permission, or any other kind of exhortation.- Morphology :...
statements with the implied subject "you", as in this example from Lorrie Moore
Lorrie Moore
Lorrie Moore is an American fiction writer known mainly for her humorous and poignant short stories.-Biography:...
's "How to Become a Writer":
- "Decide that you like college life. In your dorm you meet many nice people. Some are smarter than you. And some, you notice, are dumber than you. You will continue, unfortunately, to view the world in exactly these terms for the rest of your life."
Third-person view
Third-person narration provides the greatest flexibility to the author and thus is the most commonly used narrative mode in literature. In the third-person narrative mode, each and every character is referred to by the narrator as "he", "she", "it", or "they", but never as "I" or "we" (first-personGrammatical person
Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event; such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns...
), or "you" (second-person). In third-person narrative, it is necessary that the narrator be merely an unspecified entity
Entity
An entity is something that has a distinct, separate existence, although it need not be a material existence. In particular, abstractions and legal fictions are usually regarded as entities. In general, there is also no presumption that an entity is animate.An entity could be viewed as a set...
or uninvolved person that conveys the story, but not a character of any kind within the story being told. Third-person singular (he/she) is overwhelmingly the most common type of third-person narrative, although there have been successful uses of the third-person plural (they), as in Maxine Swann
Maxine Swann
-Life:Swann grew up on a farm in southern Pennsylvania, before attending Phillips Academy and then Columbia College, where she studied Comparative Literature and creative writing with Mary Gordon, graduating in 1994....
's short story "Flower Children". Even more common, however, is to see singular and plural used together in one story, at different times, depending upon the number of people being referred to at a given moment in the plot. Sometimes in third-person narratives, a character would refer to himself in the third-person e.g., "(Character name) would like to come with you".
The third-person modes are usually categorized along two axes. The first is the subjectivity/objectivity axis, with "subjective" narration describing one or more character's feelings and thoughts, while "objective" narration does not describe the feelings or thoughts of any characters. The second axis is between "omniscient" and "limited", a distinction that refers to the knowledge available to the narrator. An omniscient narrator has omniscient knowledge of time, people, places and events; a limited narrator, in contrast, may know absolutely everything about a single character and every piece of knowledge in that character's mind, but it is "limited" to that character—that is, it cannot describe things unknown to the focal character.
Third Person Point of View in Fiction
When discussing third person narration in creative writing of fiction there are two main aspects to consider: the objective/subjective spectrum and the difference between limited and omniscient.The first aspect of third person point of view is to understand the spectrum (or sliding scale) between objective and subjective. A narrator staying on the objective end of this spectrum can only describe the exterior world and cannot relate the thoughts, feelings, or inner workings of any character’s minds. A narrator staying on the subjective end of this spectrum tells the story exclusively from the perspective(s) of the character(s) and cannot relate any of the exterior objective world.
Traditionally, mainstream fiction with third person narration operates near the middle of the subjective/objective spectrum, alternating between objective and subjective reality and also offering alternating perspectives of the main characters. This allows the narrator to present both the objective reality and the subjective perspectives of the various characters on that reality. Given this information, the reader can then judge for themselves (without being told outright by the narrator) whether the character is a hero, fool, or other type based on the way they perceive and interact with the established reality.
The second aspect of third person point of view is to identify whether the narrator is limited or omniscient. There is no sliding scale between these two voices, no semi-omniscient or semi-limited. Within literature, limited or omniscient are considered absolutes.
The third person limited narrator is limited to knowing about one main character including the objective sphere of things that influence or have an effect on that character’s life. The limited narrator cannot leave the main character and relate the subjective inner workings of any other character in the story. This limitation is absolute. If a third person narrator seems limited but then jumps away from the main character to tell a different character’s thoughts or perspectives, they have just broken out of limited voice and shown themselves to be a third person omniscient narrator.
The third person omniscient narrator presumably knows all the objective occurrences and subjective perspectives of the entire universe where the story takes place, but they tell only the elements necessary to the story. A common mistake in understanding third person narration is to think that a narrator cannot know everything because the writer cannot know everything. However, the narrator is not the writer and vice-versa. The idea of omniscience is a convention in literature — the third person omniscient dwells within the collective unconscious and the creative writer taps into that to tell stories. Naturally, any being that is omniscient is supernatural, or God-like, and must hold back information due to the constraints of time and the potential to overwhelm the reader.
For this reason, a third person omniscient narrator may tell a story to children or young adults in a way that might feel limited to an adult reader, but this does not make them a third person limited narrator. One common device in young adult novels (such as the Harry Potter series) is to alternate perspectives of characters in different chapters. This is not a change of point of view; the same narrator is still telling the story. For the sake of the young reader, the writer made the narrative jump to an alternate perspective at a chapter break.
Many mainstream third person novels employ an omniscient narrator that delves into the thoughts and feelings of multiple characters, alternating perspectives in some form. Given multiple perspectives and objective descriptions of the reality, the complexities of big picture storytelling are more fully realized in third person narration than any other voice.
Understanding these ideas about limited and omniscient narrative voice being absolutes while objective and subjective occur on a spectrum can lead to interesting debates and discussions about point of view in literature. For instance, when looking at a complex novel such as Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion, a case can be made that the narration is third person omniscient and becomes so subjective that the story is ultimately told in alternating first person perspectives of the primary characters. The giveaway for this is that the book starts in objective third person omniscient and then moves into the minds of the characters before becoming first person. If an omniscient narrator knows everything, they would know the first person perspectives of the characters and be able to narrate following the rules for that voice.
Alternating person view
While the general rule is for novels to adopt a single approach to point of view throughout, there are exceptions. Many stories, especially in literature, alternate between the first and third person. In this case, an author will move back and forth between a more omniscient third-person narrator to a more personal first-person narrator. The Harry Potter series is told in third person limited for much of the seven novels, but deviates to omniscient in that it switches the limited view to other characters from time to time, rather than only the protagonist. However, like the A Song of Ice and FireA Song of Ice and Fire
A Song of Ice and Fire is a series of epic fantasy novels by American novelist and screenwriter George R. R. Martin. Martin began writing the series in 1991 and the first volume was published in 1996. Originally planned as a trilogy, the series now consists of five published volumes; a further two...
series, a switch of viewpoint is done only at chapter boundaries. Omniscient point of view is also referred to as alternating point of view, because the story sometimes alternates between characters. Often, a narrator using the first person will try to be more objective by also employing the third person for important action scenes, especially those in which he/she is not directly involved or in scenes where he/she is not present to have viewed the events in first person. This mode is found in the novel The Poisonwood Bible
The Poisonwood Bible
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver isa bestselling novel about a missionary family, the Prices, who in 1959 move from Georgia to the village of Kilanga in the Belgian Congo, close to the Kwilu River...
.
Epistolary novel
Epistolary novel
An epistolary novel is a novel written as a series of documents. The usual form is letters, although diary entries, newspaper clippings and other documents are sometimes used. Recently, electronic "documents" such as recordings and radio, blogs, and e-mails have also come into use...
s, which were very common in the early years of the novel, generally consist of a series of letters written by different characters, and necessarily switching when the writer changes; the classic books Frankenstein
Frankenstein
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a novel about a failed experiment that produced a monster, written by Mary Shelley, with inserts of poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley started writing the story when she was eighteen, and the novel was published when she was twenty-one. The first...
by Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley was a British novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus . She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley...
, Dracula
Dracula
Dracula is an 1897 novel by Irish author Bram Stoker.Famous for introducing the character of the vampire Count Dracula, the novel tells the story of Dracula's attempt to relocate from Transylvania to England, and the battle between Dracula and a small group of men and women led by Professor...
by Abraham "Bram" Stoker
Bram Stoker
Abraham "Bram" Stoker was an Irish novelist and short story writer, best known today for his 1897 Gothic novel Dracula...
and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde take this approach. Sometimes, though, they may all be letters from one character, such as C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
Clive Staples Lewis , commonly referred to as C. S. Lewis and known to his friends and family as "Jack", was a novelist, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian and Christian apologist from Belfast, Ireland...
' Screwtape Letters
The Screwtape Letters
The Screwtape Letters is a satirical Christian apologetics novel written in epistolary style by C. S. Lewis, first published in book form in February 1942...
and Helen Fielding
Helen Fielding
Helen Fielding is an English novelist and screenwriter, best known as the creator of the fictional character Bridget Jones, a sequence of novels and films that chronicle the life of a thirtysomething single woman in London as she tries to make sense of life and love.Her novels Bridget Jones's...
's Bridget Jones's Diary
Bridget Jones's Diary
Bridget Jones's Diary is a 1996 novel by Helen Fielding. Written in the form of a personal diary, the novel chronicles a year in the life of Bridget Jones, a thirty-something single working woman living in London. She writes about her career, self-image, vices, family, friends, and romantic...
. Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer. His best-known books include Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde....
's Treasure Island
Treasure Island
Treasure Island is an adventure novel by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson, narrating a tale of "pirates and buried gold". First published as a book on May 23, 1883, it was originally serialized in the children's magazine Young Folks between 1881–82 under the title Treasure Island; or, the...
switches between third and first person, as do Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic...
's Bleak House
Bleak House
Bleak House is the ninth novel by Charles Dickens, published in twenty monthly installments between March 1852 and September 1853. It is held to be one of Dickens's finest novels, containing one of the most vast, complex and engaging arrays of minor characters and sub-plots in his entire canon...
and Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a multilingual Russian novelist and short story writer. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist...
's The Gift. Many of William Faulkner
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
's take a series of first-person points of view. E.L. Konigsburg's novella The View from Saturday
The View from Saturday
The View from Saturday is a children's novel by E. L. Konigsburg. It won the annual Newbery Medal for excellence in American children's literature in 1997, the author's second Medal.-Summary:...
uses flashback
Flashback (narrative)
Flashback is an interjected scene that takes the narrative back in time from the current point the story has reached. Flashbacks are often used to recount events that happened before the story’s primary sequence of events or to fill in crucial backstory...
s to alternate between third person and first person throughout the book; as does Edith Wharton's novel Ethan Frome
Ethan Frome
Ethan Frome is a novel published in 1911 by the Pulitzer Prize-winning American author Edith Wharton. It is set in the fictitious town of Starkfield, Massachusetts, New England, United States...
. After the First Death
After the First Death
After the First Death is a suspense novel for young adults by American author Robert Cormier. The focus is on the complex relationships that develop between the various characters. -Synopsis:...
, by Robert Cormier
Robert Cormier
Robert Edmund Cormier was an American author, columnist and reporter, known for his deeply pessimistic, downbeat literature. His most popular works include I Am the Cheese, After the First Death, We All Fall Down and The Chocolate War, all of which have won awards. The Chocolate War was challenged...
, a novel about a fictional school bus hijacking in the late seventies, also switches from first to third person narrative using different characters. The novel The Death of Artemio Cruz
The Death of Artemio Cruz
The Death of Artemio Cruz is a novel written in 1962 by Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes and is considered to be a contributor to the Latin American literary movement known as the Latin American "Boom".-Plot summary:...
, by Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes
Carlos Fuentes
Carlos Fuentes Macías is a Mexican writer and one of the best-known living novelists and essayists in the Spanish-speaking world. He has influenced contemporary Latin American literature, and his works have been widely translated into English and other languages.-Biography:Fuentes was born in...
, switches between the three persons from one chapter to the next, even though all refer to the same protagonist
Protagonist
A protagonist is the main character of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, or musical narrative, around whom the events of the narrative's plot revolve and with whom the audience is intended to most identify...
. The novel Dreaming in Cuban
Dreaming in Cuban
Dreaming in Cuban is the first novel written by author Cristina García, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. This novel moves between Cuba and the United States featuring three generations of a single family. The novel focuses particularly on the females—Celia del Pino, her daughters...
, by Cristina García
Cristina García
Cristina García is a Cuban-born American journalist and novelist. After working for Time Magazine as a researcher, reporter, and Miami bureau chief, she turned to writing fiction. Her first novel, Dreaming in Cuban , received critical acclaim and was a finalist for the National Book Award...
, alternates between third person limited and first person depending on the generation of the speaker; the grandchildren recount events in first person while the parents and grandparent are shown in third person limited.
Narrative voice
The narrative voice describes how the story is conveyed (for example, by "viewing" a character's thought processes, by reading a letter written for someone, by a retelling of a character's experiences, etc.).Stream-of-consciousness voice
A stream of consciousness gives the (almost always first-person) narrator's perspective by attempting to replicate the thought processes (as opposed to simply the actions and spoken words) of the narrative character. Often, interior monologues and inner desires or motivations, as well as pieces of incomplete thoughts, are expressed to the audience (but not necessarily to other characters). Examples include the multiple narrators' feelings in William Faulkner's The Sound and the FuryThe Sound and the Fury
The Sound and the Fury is a novel written by the American author William Faulkner. It employs a number of narrative styles, including the technique known as stream of consciousness, pioneered by 20th century European novelists such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Published in 1929, The Sound and...
and As I Lay Dying, the character Offred's often fragmented thoughts in Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood
Margaret Eleanor Atwood, is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist. She is among the most-honoured authors of fiction in recent history; she is a winner of the Arthur C...
's The Handmaid's Tale
The Handmaid's Tale
The Handmaid's Tale is a dystopian novel, a work of science fiction or speculative fiction, written by Canadian author Margaret Atwood and first published by McClelland and Stewart in 1985...
, and the development of the narrator's nightmarish experience in Queen
Queen (band)
Queen are a British rock band formed in London in 1971, originally consisting of Freddie Mercury , Brian May , John Deacon , and Roger Taylor...
's hit song, Bohemian Rhapsody
Bohemian Rhapsody
"Bohemian Rhapsody" is a song by the British rock band Queen. It was written by Freddie Mercury for the band's 1975 album A Night at the Opera...
.
Character voice
One of the most common narrative voices, used especially with first- and third-person viewpoints is the character voice in which an actual conscious "person" (in most cases, a living human being) is presented as the narrator. In this situation, the narrator is no longer an unspecified entity, but rather, a more relatable, realistic human character who may or may not be involved in the actions of his or her story and who may or may not take a biased approach in the storytelling. If he or she is directly involved in the plot, this narrator is also called the viewpoint character. The viewpoint character is not necessarily the focal characterFocal character
In any narrative, the focal character is the character on whom the audience is meant to place the majority of their interest and attention. He or she is almost always also the protagonist of the story; however, in cases where the "focal character" and "protagonist" are separate, the focal...
: examples of supporting viewpoint characters include Doctor Watson
John Watson (Sherlock Holmes)
John H. Watson, M.D. , known as Dr. Watson, is a character in the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Watson is Sherlock Holmes's friend, assistant and sometime flatmate, and is the first person narrator of all but four stories in the Sherlock Holmes canon.-Name:Doctor Watson's first...
, Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird
To Kill a Mockingbird
To Kill a Mockingbird is a novel by Harper Lee published in 1960. It was instantly successful, winning the Pulitzer Prize, and has become a classic of modern American literature...
, and The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby is a novel by the American author F. Scott Fitzgerald. First published in1925, it is set on Long Island's North Shore and in New York City from spring to autumn of 1922....
's Nick Carraway.
Unreliable voice
Under the character voice is the unreliable narrative voice which involves the use of a non-credible or untrustworthy narrator. This mode may be employed to give the audience a deliberate sense of disbelief in the story or a level of suspicion or mystery as to what information is meant to be true and what is false. This unreliability is often developed by the author to demonstrate that the narrator is psychologically unstable; has an enormous bias; is unknowledgeable, ignorant, or childish; or, is perhaps purposefully trying to deceive the audience. Unreliable narrators are usually first-person narrators. However, when a third-person narrator is considered unreliable for any reason, his or her viewpoint may be termed "third-person, subjective."Examples include "Chief" Bromden in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey, Holden Caulfield
Holden Caulfield
Holden Caulfield is the 16-to-17 years old protagonist of author J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. He is universally recognized for his resistance to growing older and desire to protect childhood innocence...
in the novel "The Catcher In The Rye
The Catcher in the Rye
The Catcher in the Rye is a 1951 novel by J. D. Salinger. Originally published for adults, it has since become popular with adolescent readers for its themes of teenage confusion, angst, alienation, language, and rebellion. It has been translated into almost all of the world's major...
", Dr. James Sheppard in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie, and Humbert Humbert in the novel Lolita
Lolita
Lolita is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, first written in English and published in 1955 in Paris and 1958 in New York, and later translated by the author into Russian...
by Vladimir Nabokov.
A naive narrator is one who is so ignorant and inexperienced that he/she actually exposes the faults and issues of his/her world. It is used particularly in satire
Satire
Satire is primarily a literary genre or form, although in practice it can also be found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement...
, in situations where the user can draw more inferences about the narrator's environment than the narrator. Child narrators can also fall under this category.
Epistolary voice
The epistolary narrative voice uses a (usually fictional) series of letters and other documents to convey the plot of the story. Although epistolary works can be considered multiple-person narratives, they also can be classified separately, as they arguably have no narrator at all—just an author who has gathered the documents together in one place. One famous example is Mary ShelleyMary Shelley
Mary Shelley was a British novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus . She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley...
's Frankenstein
Frankenstein
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a novel about a failed experiment that produced a monster, written by Mary Shelley, with inserts of poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley started writing the story when she was eighteen, and the novel was published when she was twenty-one. The first...
which is a single story written in a letter. Another is Bram Stoker
Bram Stoker
Abraham "Bram" Stoker was an Irish novelist and short story writer, best known today for his 1897 Gothic novel Dracula...
's Dracula
Dracula
Dracula is an 1897 novel by Irish author Bram Stoker.Famous for introducing the character of the vampire Count Dracula, the novel tells the story of Dracula's attempt to relocate from Transylvania to England, and the battle between Dracula and a small group of men and women led by Professor...
, which tells the story in a series of diary entries and newspaper clippings. Les Liaisons dangereuses
Les Liaisons dangereuses
Les Liaisons dangereuses is a French epistolary novel by Choderlos de Laclos, first published in four volumes by Durand Neveu from March 23, 1782....
(Dangerous Liaisons) by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos was a French novelist, official and army general, best known for writing the epistolary novel Les Liaisons dangereuses ....
is again made up of the correspondence between the main characters, most notably the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont. Langston Hughes does the same thing in a shorter form in his story "Passing," which consists of a young man's letter to his mother.
Third-person voices
The third-person narrative voices are narrative-voice techniques employed solely under the category of the third-person view.Third-person, subjective
The third-person subjective is when the narrator conveys the thoughts, feelings, opinions, etc. of one or more characters. If it is just one character, it can be termed third-person limited, in which the reader is "limited" to the thoughts of some particular character (often the protagonistProtagonist
A protagonist is the main character of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, or musical narrative, around whom the events of the narrative's plot revolve and with whom the audience is intended to most identify...
) as in the first-person mode (though still giving personal descriptions using "he", "she", "it", and "they", but not "I"). This is almost always the main character—e.g., Gabriel in Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
's The Dead
The Dead (short story)
"The Dead" is the final short story in the 1914 collection Dubliners by James Joyce. It is the longest story in the collection and is often considered the best of Joyce's shorter works. At 15,672 words it has also been considered a novella....
, Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist and short story writer.Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in 1804 in the city of Salem, Massachusetts to Nathaniel Hathorne and the former Elizabeth Clarke Manning. His ancestors include John Hathorne, a judge during the Salem Witch Trials...
's Young Goodman Brown, or the elderly fisherman in Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
's The Old Man and the Sea
The Old Man and the Sea
The Old Man and the Sea is a novel written by American author Ernest Hemingway in 1951 in Cuba, and published in 1952. It was the last major work of fiction to be produced by Hemingway and published in his lifetime. One of his most famous works, it centers upon Santiago, an aging fisherman who...
. Certain third-person omniscient modes are also classifiable as "third person, subjective" modes that switch between the thoughts, feelings, etc. of all the characters.
This style, in both its limited and omniscient variants, became the most popular narrative perspective during the twentieth century. In contrast to the broad, sweeping perspectives seen in many nineteenth-century novels, third-person subjective is sometimes called the "over the shoulder" perspective; the narrator only describes events perceived and information known by a character. At its narrowest and most subjective scope, the story reads as though the viewpoint character were narrating it; dramatically this is very similar to the first person, in that it allows in-depth revelation of the protagonist's personality, but it uses third-person grammar. Some writers will shift perspective from one viewpoint character to another.
The focal character
Focal character
In any narrative, the focal character is the character on whom the audience is meant to place the majority of their interest and attention. He or she is almost always also the protagonist of the story; however, in cases where the "focal character" and "protagonist" are separate, the focal...
, protagonist
Protagonist
A protagonist is the main character of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, or musical narrative, around whom the events of the narrative's plot revolve and with whom the audience is intended to most identify...
, antagonist
Antagonist
An antagonist is a character, group of characters, or institution, that represents the opposition against which the protagonist must contend...
, or some other character's thoughts are revealed through the narrator. The reader learns the events of the narrative through the perceptions of the chosen character.
Third-person, objective
The third-person objective employs a narrator who tells a story without describing any character's thoughts, opinions, or feelings; instead it gives an objectiveObjectivity (philosophy)
Objectivity is a central philosophical concept which has been variously defined by sources. A proposition is generally considered to be objectively true when its truth conditions are met and are "mind-independent"—that is, not met by the judgment of a conscious entity or subject.- Objectivism...
, unbiased point of view. Often the narrator is self-dehumanized in order to make the narrative more neutral; this type of narrative mode, outside of fiction, is often employed by newspaper articles, biographical documents, and scientific journals. This point of view can be described as a "fly on the wall" or "camera lens" approach that can only record the observable actions, but does not interpret these actions or relay what thoughts are going through the minds of the characters. Works of fiction that use this style put a great deal of emphasis on characters acting out their feelings in an observable way. Internal thoughts, if expressed, are given voice through an aside or soliloquy. While this approach does not allow the author to reveal the unexpressed thoughts and feelings of the characters, it does allow the author to reveal information that not all or any of the characters may be aware of. A typical example of this so called camera-eye perspective is e.g. Hills Like White Elephants
Hills Like White Elephants
"Hills Like White Elephants" is a short story by Ernest Hemingway. It was first published in the 1927 collection Men Without Women.-Plot summary:...
by Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
.
The third-person objective is preferred in most pieces that are deliberately trying to take a neutral or unbiased view, like in many newspaper articles. It is also called the third-person dramatic, because the narrator (like the audience of a drama) is neutral and ineffective toward the progression of the plot — merely an uninvolved onlooker. It was also used around the mid-twentieth century by French novelists writing in the nouveau roman tradition.
Third-person, omniscient
Historically, the third-person omniscient perspective has been the most commonly used; it is seen in countless classic novels, including works by Jane AustenJane Austen
Jane Austen was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature, her realism and biting social commentary cementing her historical importance among scholars and critics.Austen lived...
, Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...
, Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic...
, and George Eliot
George Eliot
Mary Anne Evans , better known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, journalist and translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era...
. This is a tale told from the point of view of a storyteller who plays no part in the story but knows all the facts, including the characters' thoughts. It sometimes even takes a subjective approach. One advantage of omniscience is that this mode enhances the sense of objective reliability (i.e. truthfulness) of the plot. The third-person omniscient narrator is the least capable of being unreliable—although the omniscient narrator can have its own personality, offering judgments and opinions on the behavior of the characters.
In addition to reinforcing the sense of the narrator as reliable (and thus of the story as true), the main advantage of this mode is that it is eminently suited to telling huge, sweeping, epic stories, and/or complicated stories involving numerous characters. The disadvantage of this mode is that it can create more distance between the audience and the story, and that—when used in conjunction with a sweeping, epic "cast of thousands" story—characterization is more limited, which can reduce the reader's identification with or attachment to the characters. A classic example of both the advantages and disadvantages of this mode is J. R. R. Tolkien
J. R. R. Tolkien
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, CBE was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor, best known as the author of the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion.Tolkien was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College,...
's The Lord of the Rings
The Lord of the Rings
The Lord of the Rings is a high fantasy epic written by English philologist and University of Oxford professor J. R. R. Tolkien. The story began as a sequel to Tolkien's earlier, less complex children's fantasy novel The Hobbit , but eventually developed into a much larger work. It was written in...
series. However, as demonstrated by Isabel Allende
Isabel Allende
Isabel Allende Llona is a Chilean writer with American citizenship. Allende, whose works sometimes contain aspects of the "magic realist" tradition, is famous for novels such as The House of the Spirits and City of the Beasts , which have been commercially successful...
's The House of the Spirits
The House of the Spirits
The House of the Spirits is the debut novel by Isabel Allende. Initially, the novel was rejected by several Spanish-language publishers, but became an instant best seller when published in Barcelona in 1982. The novel was critically acclaimed around the world, and catapulted Allende to literary...
, this mode can capture huge sweeping stories (such as the political history of Chile, a major element of the novel) while also maintaining the reader's intimacy with certain key characters . Ann Patchett
Ann Patchett
Ann Patchett is an American author. She received the Orange Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2002 for her novel Bel Canto. Patchett's other novels include Run, The Patron Saint of Liars, Taft, and The Magician's Assistant, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize...
's Bel Canto
Bel Canto (novel)
Bel Canto is a 2001 novel by American author Ann Patchett, published by Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. It was awarded both the Orange Prize for Fiction and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction...
also illustrates how this mode can be used to tell a complicated story involving dozens of characters while maintaining intimacy with the key characters .
Some make the distinction between the third-person omniscient and the universal omniscient, the difference being that in universal omniscient, the narrator reveals information that the characters do not have. This is also called "Little Did He Know" writing, as in, "Little did he know he'd be dead by morning." Usually, the universal omniscient enforces the idea of the narrator being unconnected to the events of the story.
Some more modern examples are Lemony Snicket
Lemony Snicket
Lemony Snicket is the pen name of American novelist Daniel Handler . Snicket is the author of several children's books, serving as the narrator of A Series of Unfortunate Events and appearing as a character within the series. Because of this, the name Lemony Snicket may refer to both a fictional...
, James Eugene Robinson in his novel, The Flower of Grass, and Philip Pullman
Philip Pullman
Philip Pullman CBE, FRSL is an English writer from Norwich. He is the best-selling author of several books, most notably his trilogy of fantasy novels, His Dark Materials, and his fictionalised biography of Jesus, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ...
. In some unusual cases, the reliability and impartiality of the narrator may in fact be as suspect
Unreliable narrator
An unreliable narrator is a narrator, whether in literature, film, or theatre, whose credibility has been seriously compromised. The term was coined in 1961 by Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction. This narrative mode is one that can be developed by an author for a number of reasons, usually...
as in the third person limited.
Narrative tense
The narrative tense or narrative time determines the grammatical tenseGrammatical tense
A tense is a grammatical category that locates a situation in time, to indicate when the situation takes place.Bernard Comrie, Aspect, 1976:6:...
of the story; whether in the past, present, or future.
Past tense
The most common in literature and story-telling in the English, Chinese, and Portuguese languages; the events of the plot are depicted as occurring sometime before the current moment or the time at which the narrative was constructed or expressed to an audience. (e.g. "They drove happily. They had found their way and were preparing to celebrate.")Present tense
The events of the plot are depicted as occurring now—at the current moment—in real-timePresent
Present is a time that is neither past nor future.Present may also refer to:- Time and timing :* Present tense, the grammatical tense of a verb* Before Present, radiocarbon dates relative to AD 1950* Presenting, a medical term* Presenteeism...
. (e.g. "They drive happily. They have found their way and are now preparing to celebrate.") In English this tense, known as the "historical present
Historical present
In linguistics and rhetoric, the historical present refers to the employment of the present tense when narrating past events...
", is more common in spontaneous conversational narratives than in written literature.
Future tense
Extremely rare in literature; the events of the plot are depicted as occurring soon or eventually; often, these upcoming events are described in a way that makes it seem like the narrators uncannily know (or believe they know) the future. Some future-tense stories have a propheticProphecy
Prophecy is a process in which one or more messages that have been communicated to a prophet are then communicated to others. Such messages typically involve divine inspiration, interpretation, or revelation of conditioned events to come as well as testimonies or repeated revelations that the...
feel. (e.g. "They will drive happily. They will find their way and will prepare to celebrate.")
Fiction-writing mode
Narration has more than one meaning. In its broadest sense, narration encompasses all forms of story-telling, fictional or not; personal anecdotes, "true crime," and historical narratives all fit here, along with many other "non-fiction" forms. More narrowly, however, "narration" refers to all written fiction. Finally, in its most restricted sense, narration is the fiction-writing mode whereby the narrator communicates directly to the reader.Along with exposition
Exposition (literary technique)
At the beginning of a narrative, the exposition is the author's providing of some background information to the audience about the plot, characters' histories, setting, and theme. Exposition is considered one of four rhetorical modes of discourse, along with argumentation, description, and narration...
, argumentation, and description
Description
Description is one of four rhetorical modes , along with exposition, argumentation, and narration. Each of the rhetorical modes is present in a variety of forms and each has its own purpose and conventions....
, narration (broadly defined) is one of four rhetorical modes
Rhetorical modes
Rhetorical modes describe the variety, conventions, and purposes of the major kinds of writing. Four of the most common rhetorical modes and their purpose are exposition, argumentation, description, and narration....
of discourse. In the context of rhetorical modes, the purpose of narration is to tell a story or to narrate an event or series of events. Narrative may exist in a variety of forms: biographies, anecdotes, short stories, novels. In this context, all written fiction may be viewed as narration.
Narrowly defined, narration is the fiction-writing mode whereby the narrator is communicating directly to the reader. But if the broad definition of narration includes all written fiction, and the narrow definition is limited merely to that which is directly communicated to the reader, then what comprises the rest of written fiction? The remainder of written fiction would be in the form of any of the other fiction-writing modes. Narration, as a fiction-writing mode, is a matter for discussion among fiction writers and writing coaches.
Other types and uses
In literature, person is used to describe the viewpoint from which the narrativeNarrative
A narrative is a constructive format that describes a sequence of non-fictional or fictional events. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to recount", and is related to the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled"...
is presented. Although second-person perspectives are occasionally used, the most commonly encountered are first and third person. Third person omniscient specifies a viewpoint in which readers are provided with information not available to characters within the story; without this qualifier, readers may or may not have such information.
In movies
Film
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...
and video games first- and third-person describe camera viewpoints
Virtual camera system
A virtual camera system aims at controlling a camera or a set of cameras to display a view of a 3D virtual world. Camera systems are used in videogames where their purpose is to show the action at the best possible angle; more generally, they are used in 3D virtual worlds when a third person view...
. These have nothing to do with linguistic persons. The first-person is from a character's own perspective, and the third-person is the more familiar, "general" camera showing a scene. A so-called second-person may also be used to showing a main character from a secondary character's perspective.
For example, in a horror film
Horror film
Horror films seek to elicit a negative emotional reaction from viewers by playing on the audience's most primal fears. They often feature scenes that startle the viewer through the means of macabre and the supernatural, thus frequently overlapping with the fantasy and science fiction genres...
, the first-person perspective of an antagonist
Antagonist
An antagonist is a character, group of characters, or institution, that represents the opposition against which the protagonist must contend...
could become a second-person perspective on a potential victim's actions. A third-person shot of the two characters could be used to show the narrowing distance between them.
In video games, a first-person perspective is used most often in the first-person shooter
First-person shooter
First-person shooter is a video game genre that centers the gameplay on gun and projectile weapon-based combat through first-person perspective; i.e., the player experiences the action through the eyes of a protagonist. Generally speaking, the first-person shooter shares common traits with other...
genre, such as in Doom, or in simulations (racing games, flight simulation games, and such). Third-person perspectives on characters are typically used in all other games. Since the arrival of 3D computer graphics
3D computer graphics
3D computer graphics are graphics that use a three-dimensional representation of geometric data that is stored in the computer for the purposes of performing calculations and rendering 2D images...
in games it is often possible for the player to switch between first- and third-person perspectives at will; this is usually done to improve spatial awareness, but can also improve the accuracy of weapons use in generally third-person games such as the Metal Gear Solid
Metal Gear Solid
is a videogame by Hideo Kojima. The game was developed by Konami Computer Entertainment Japan and first published by Konami in 1998 for the PlayStation video game console. It is the sequel to Kojimas early MSX2 computer games Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake...
franchise.
Text-based interactive fiction
Interactive fiction
Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, describes software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives and as video games. In common usage, the term refers to text...
conventionally has descriptions written in the second person (though exceptions exist), telling the character what he is seeing and doing, such as Zork
Zork
Zork was one of the first interactive fiction computer games and an early descendant of Colossal Cave Adventure. The first version of Zork was written in 1977–1979 on a DEC PDP-10 computer by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling, and implemented in the MDL programming language...
. This practice is also encountered occasionally in text-based segments of graphical games.
See also
- DescriptionDescriptionDescription is one of four rhetorical modes , along with exposition, argumentation, and narration. Each of the rhetorical modes is present in a variety of forms and each has its own purpose and conventions....
- Dual NarrativeDual NarrativeA dual narrative is a form of narrative that tells a story in two different perspectives. Sometimes by two different people like in the book "Thirteen Reasons Why" by Jay Asher Also dual narrative is an effective technique that can be used to tell a story in first person narrative although in past...
- Fiction-writing modesFiction-writing modesA fiction-writing mode is a manner of writing with its own set of conventions regarding how, when, and where it should be used.Fiction is a form of narrative, one of the four rhetorical modes of discourse. Fiction-writing also has distinct forms of expression, or modes, each with its own purposes...
- Franz Karl StanzelFranz Karl StanzelFranz Karl Stanzel is an Austrian literary theorist, specialised in English literature.After finishing his degree with Herbert Koziol in Graz and after his habilitation in 1955, he was professor in Göttingen. In 1959 he was offered a position as professor in Erlangen. In 1962 he succeeded Koziol...
- Grammatical personGrammatical personGrammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event; such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns...
- Gérard GenetteGérard GenetteGérard Genette is a French literary theorist, associated in particular with the structuralist movement and such figures as Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss, from whom he adapted the concept of bricolage.-Life:...
- NarratorNarratorA narrator is, within any story , the fictional or non-fictional, personal or impersonal entity who tells the story to the audience. When the narrator is also a character within the story, he or she is sometimes known as the viewpoint character. The narrator is one of three entities responsible for...
- Third person omniscient
- Unreliable narratorUnreliable narratorAn unreliable narrator is a narrator, whether in literature, film, or theatre, whose credibility has been seriously compromised. The term was coined in 1961 by Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction. This narrative mode is one that can be developed by an author for a number of reasons, usually...
- Unspeakable SentencesUnspeakable SentencesUnspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction is a study of sentences in free indirect speech and its limitations, published in 1982 by American linguist Ann Banfield....
Further reading
- Card, Orson Scott. Characters and Viewpoint. Cincinnati: Writer's Digest Books 1988.
- Fludernik, Monika. Towards a "Natural" Narratology. London: Routledge 1996.
- Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method. Transl. by Jane Lewin. Oxford: Blackwell 1980 (Translation of Discours du récit).
- Stanzel, Franz Karl. A theory of Narrative. Transl. by Charlotte Goedsche. Cambridge: CUP 1984 (Transl. of Theorie des Erzählens).