POVs, omniscient narration, and... and...

[AG31]

This morning, as I was reading Fatal Gambit by David Lagercrantz, I noticed that I was not given any information by the narrator that was not in the consciousness (thoughts or words or experience) of one of the main characters. "Oh!" I said to myself. "That's another way narration can vary." "Duh," say you professional and self-identified authors. Well, I'm not an author, exactly, but I do enjoy these discussions. I got to thinking about a recent one about 2nd person POV. I learned there that 2nd person is really a form of first person.

Anyway, I kept turning over the various ways we categorize narration. Here's what I've come up with. I'm hoping you folks will correct or add to or whatever. "Why don't you Google it?" you may ask. Because Google is sterile. AH is alive and messy and unexpected.

So here's what I've got so far.

Narration
omniscient - Knows things the characters aren't currently thinking about. (Is it correct to put back stories here?)
not omniscient - not omniscient - is there a term for this?
close - only tells us things the characters are thinking or saying. I'm not sure of this. I've only seen it used by @ElectricBlue, but this is what I took away from it.
???? - Narration that doesn't know anything about the thoughts of the characters. Just their actions and words. eg., Agatha Christie
takes the POV of many characters in turn - is there a term?
takes the POV of only one character

POV
1st person - Narrator uses "I"
2nd person - Narrator uses "you." Does not use "I"
This can be divided into narration that is really about the narrator and narration that is really about the one addressed. Terms?
3rd person - Narrator uses he/she/they

Degree to which the narrator's personality is evident or hidden.

Are there other main categories for classifying these sorts of things? Is there an over-arching term for this sort of stuff? That is, a narrative style, but not including things like spare, flowery, descriptive, klunky, etc.


Edit: Is there a way to preserve indentations? Mine disappear when I publish the post.

 

[TheWritingGroup]

... Well, I'm not an author, exactly ...

I'm intrigued. What kind of not-exactly-an-author are you?

-Annie

 

[AllenWoody]

In my head the non-omniscient form is "limited". So, first person limited means you're in the head of a single narrator who has no awareness beyond what he/she experiences. To me this is the most natural pairing.

Third-person can also be limited. We're still only reading about what a single person experiences. Third-person omniscient gets inside the head of multiple characters.

I was taught that limited points of view are the most natural and they are what I gravitate toward. That's just me.

 

[TheLobster]

takes the POV of many characters in turn - is there a term?
takes the POV of only one character

I believe that a 3rd person narrator, especially if distant (i.e. not "close", as you defined it), can also tell the story from a PoV that's independent from any of the characters. Watching them from the side, so to speak.

 

[ElectricBlue]

In my head the non-omniscient form is "limited". So, first person limited means you're in the head of a single narrator who has no awareness beyond what he/she experiences. To me this is the most natural pairing.

First person can only be limited or close, by definition. The narrator is the person, I.

Third-person can also be limited. We're still only reading about what a single person experiences.

That's my definition of close or limited third person, where the narrator isn't I, but sits close along side, telling the story from one character's point of view. I do this a lot, but will often alternate between the principal characters - for a long stretch of the story, clearly signified in one way or another. Head hopping drives me nuts, especially when writers do it within the same paragraph - that's poor writing, I reckon.

Third-person omniscient gets inside the head of multiple characters.

Agree, but not always inside their heads - very often, omniscient narrates their actions but not their thoughts.

I was taught that limited points of view are the most natural and they are what I gravitate toward. That's just me.

I don't recall being explicitly taught this, but probably was, long ago. I do remember reading a description of close (limited) third, and thinking, oh, that's what I do. Once I started doing it.

 

[Britva415]

Third-person can also be limited. We're still only reading about what a single person experiences.

This is one way to write third-person in a “limited” mode, but “omniscient” can also follow one single character and multiple-character 3p narration can also be “limited.”

Omniscient just means narrating stuff which none of the characters are (or could) directly experience.

 

[StillStunned]

Head hopping drives me nuts, especially when writers do it within the same paragraph - that's poor writing, I reckon.

It's often an easy way to do "show v tell": you hop from the narrator's head to the head of the person they're talking to so that you can "show" how the narrator is feeling. For example:

===
Tommy walked down the stairs and passed through the kitchen to the living room. Abby was sitting at the table, a glass of wine in her hand. She looked up as he entered, as beautiful as ever. His heart skipped a beat just seeing her.

"We need to talk." He'd been working up to this all day. He had to tell her how he felt.

"I have nothing to say to you," she said. Seeing the hurt in his eyes she turned away.

He took a deep breath and tried again. "No, we're going to talk now."
===

Writers hop heads because they've been taught not to "tell" how their character is feeling. But they can't think how to convey emotion, so they try to "show" it from a different perspective. It sets my teeth on edge.

 

[SimonDoom]

I think of the taxonomy of POV this way:

3d person POV: The story is narrated in the third person. Characterized by the use of third person pronouns to narrate the story rather than the first person pronoun "I."

3d person POV is roughly broken into three types, although for purposes of most fiction, two:

3d person omniscient: The narrator is not limited to the perspective of any one character, or of any character. The narrator may disclose the thoughts and perspectives of multiple characters within a scene, and ALSO the narrator's own perspective, independent of that of the characters.

3d person limited POV: The narrator tells the story from the POV of only one character throughout the story, or of only one character within a discrete and clear section. A good example of this is Game of Thrones, where there are multiple POV characters but each has her or his own chapter to provide his or her perspective.

3d person limited "close" or to use my term "free indirect style." This is a subset of 3d person limited POV in which the narrator very carefully limits narration only to those things that a main character would see and know and describes them how that character would descibe them.

3d person objective: This is where the narrator objectively narrates the action without describing what a character is thinking of feeling or observing. This is rare in fiction, for obvious reasons. It's more common in journalism.


First person POV: Told using "I" where the POV is from the narrator's point of view. Usually, but not always, the narrator is a major character.


2d person POV: The pronoun "you" is used to describe both the narrator's and character's POV. People get this confused all the time. A story told by an "I" addressed to a "you" is not second person; it's first person.

They key question is: whose thoughts are disclosed? It's not just a matter of the pronouns. If "I" am speaking to "you," it's not second person because I may be addressing you but I'm disclosing "my" thoughts. That's the definition of first person POV.

 

[Britva415]

OP might be interested in the concept of “reliable narrator.”

Typically, 3p pov stories are written in the “reliable” fashion, but a 3p narrator could also be unreliable.

We typically expect any form of “limited” pov to be “unreliable,” but that’s not a definition or rule either.

So “reliability” is yet another dimension of describing the narration.

 

[Britva415]

Seeing the hurt in his eyes she turned away.

This to me is an example of how in order to show you have to tell, and here we’re telling one thing (how he feels) but that’s not all that’s being said here.

She saw the hurt and ignored it. The part that’s being shown here is how she feels and maybe is motivated: Unsympathetic, dismissive, maybe selfish or maybe she has her reasons, but, this was shown by what was told.

“Show don’t tell” really means “Tell something. Just, not the thing you want them to read between the lines.”

Also, on the subject of head-hopping, I don’t quite get what the “narrator’s head” is, here. Is the narrator a character who we just don’t see in this snippet?

Can a truly omniscient narrator have a “head” which the readers should be exposed to?

If so, is that a kind of fourth-wall breaking?

Not sure what I think about the concept of the narrator projecting their thoughts and feelings into the heads of characters they’re narrating about. If it happens, I think it would have to be considered “unreliable narration,” if what you’re saying is that the character doesn’t really experience what the narrator says they do because it’s really the narrator who’s experiencing it.

 

[Bramblethorn]

First person can only be limited or close, by definition.

Not sure about that. Limited is the usual choice for first-person, but the author still has the option of presenting information not known to the narrating character.

I knew the dame was trouble as soon as she walked into my office. What I didn't know was that she had the largest stamp collection this side of the Missouri.

If the narrator gets a chance to learn that information later in the story, we could consider it limited perspective, but if no plausible way for them to know that info is ever presented then it'd be first person omniscient. It's just not a very good choice because it's likely to annoy the reader and get them thinking about the distinction between the real author and the fictional narrator, which isn't something you want the reader doing usually.

But there are ways to make it less jarring. For instance, most of the books in Charles Stross's "Laundry" series are told from the perspective of Bob Howard, an employee of a secret government agency, but they include description of events Bob couldn't have witnessed. The explanation given is that Bob has written these books from his notes, drawing on other sources to interpolate events that he didn't witness.

Another option is to introduce some kind of side-text, e.g. footnotes, to provide information that the first-person narrator doesn't know. Those can be attributed to a secondary narrator (I've seen this done in another series which is presented as the journals of an old soldier, occasionally annotated by an editor to provide context that the author didn't have) or just left with no in-universe attribution. I guess one could argue that the former option is really just a combination of two first-person limited narratives, and the latter is a combination of first-person limited and third-person omniscient, but the effect is something very much like "first person omniscient".

 

[Bramblethorn]

OP might be interested in the concept of “reliable narrator.”

Typically, 3p pov stories are written in the “reliable” fashion, but a 3p narrator could also be unreliable.

We typically expect any form of “limited” pov to be “unreliable,” but that’s not a definition or rule either.

So “reliability” is yet another dimension of describing the narration.

There are gradations within that, too. There are narrators who are honest with the reader as far as they can be - they're only unreliable because their own understanding of things is limited - and then there are narrators who intentionally obscure information they know.

Are there other main categories for classifying these sorts of things? Is there an over-arching term for this sort of stuff? That is, a narrative style, but not including things like spare, flowery, descriptive, klunky, etc.

Perhaps "technical aspects of style"?

 

[StillStunned]

This to me is an example of how in order to show you have to tell, and here we’re telling one thing (how he feels) but that’s not all that’s being said here.

She saw the hurt and ignored it. The part that’s being shown here is how she feels and maybe is motivated: Unsympathetic, dismissive, maybe selfish or maybe she has her reasons, but, this was shown by what was told.

“Show don’t tell” really means “Tell something. Just, not the thing you want them to read between the lines.”

Also, on the subject of head-hopping, I don’t quite get what the “narrator’s head” is, here. Is the narrator a character who we just don’t see in this snippet?

This was just a snippet I jotted down to illustrate the point. The narrator, or at least the POV character in this scene, is Tommy. We follow him downstairs and into the living room. We feel his reaction as he sees Abby. But then when Abby's reply hurts him, we hop to Abby's perspective to show the hurt on his face, rather than letting the reader experience it from Tommy's own perspective. And then we're back to Tommy again as he gives it another try.

It's probably not the best example, but I hope you see what I mean. We're inside Tommy's head, then we skip to Abby's head for a second to show an emotion on his face, then it's back again.

Can a truly omniscient narrator have a “head” which the readers should be exposed to?

If so, is that a kind of fourth-wall breaking?

I'd say that omniscient third comes close to breaking the fourth wall. It can give a sense of the narrator and the reader on one side, looking at the characters and event from a distance.

Not sure what I think about the concept of the narrator projecting their thoughts and feelings into the heads of characters they’re narrating about. If it happens, I think it would have to be considered “unreliable narration,” if what you’re saying is that the character doesn’t really experience what the narrator says they do because it’s really the narrator who’s experiencing it.

By definition, I think that in close 3P the narrator *is* the character. The writer might be projecting, but the narrator is the character experiencing the events and emotions. And that's where headhopping becomes really problematic, because the narrator changes for a split second.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Not sure about that. Limited is the usual choice for first-person, but the author still has the option of presenting information not known to the narrating character.

I knew the dame was trouble as soon as she walked into my office. What I didn't know was that she had the largest stamp collection this side of the Missouri.

That's as clunky as a square wheeled go cart for me. The narrator has just said he doesn't know something, so how can he know it? That's a logic fail to my eye - too much of that, and I'd be saying, just narrate the thing in third person. Presenting the past is fine, but pre-empting some future knowledge makes little sense to me.

 

[TheLobster]

Not sure about that. Limited is the usual choice for first-person, but the author still has the option of presenting information not known to the narrating character.

I knew the dame was trouble as soon as she walked into my office. What I didn't know was that she had the largest stamp collection this side of the Missouri.

If the narrator gets a chance to learn that information later in the story, we could consider it limited perspective, but if no plausible way for them to know that info is ever presented then it'd be first person omniscient. It's just not a very good choice because it's likely to annoy the reader and get them thinking about the distinction between the real author and the fictional narrator, which isn't something you want the reader doing usually.

You can get away with this if you:

1. do it sparingly
2. indicate it's knowledge that's going to be obtained by the narrating character further in the story ("What I didn't know yet ...")
3. actually justify it later, not necessarily explicitly ("On her wall, I saw a certificate from a state's philatelist society") but at least somewhat plausibly

Like you mention later, this can be done rather effortlessly if the story has a framing device and the reader knows the events are told as though they are truly in the character's past (beyond the choice of tense).

 

[Bazzle]

Tommy has a very expressive face, people can easily read him. The hurt in his eyes was obvious to everyone in the room...

 

[SimonDoom]

First person can only be limited or close, by definition. The narrator is the person, I.

We have to be cautious about talking about points of view in a limited or exclusive sense. It's possible to play around with points of view and do almost anything.

For example, Philip Roth's Zuckerman novels are told from the first point of view of a writer named Zuckerman, but during the novel Zuckerman imaginatively reconstructs the points of view of third-person characters about whom he is narrating, so in effect it's a first person omniscient point of view. It's a blend of first-person and third-person that constantly raises the question in the reader's mind: how could Zuckerman know this?

 

[Bazzle]

I tried and proved i couldn't write a two different POV stories in one with Phantom Flings...so will now out the conversation!

 

[TarnishedPenny]

Edit: Is there a way to preserve indentations? Mine disappear when I publish the post.

What kind of indentations? One can use – and/or — in multiples for modest indentations.

 

[XerXesXu]

That's as clunky as a square wheeled go cart for me. The narrator has just said he doesn't know something, so how can he know it? That's a logic fail to my eye - too much of that, and I'd be saying, just narrate the thing in third person. Presenting the past is fine, but pre-empting some future knowledge makes little sense to me.

Really? Written in past tense? Many might find it an engaging opening line.

 

[Bramblethorn]

That's as clunky as a square wheeled go cart for me. The narrator has just said he doesn't know something, so how can he know it? That's a logic fail to my eye - too much of that, and I'd be saying, just narrate the thing in third person. Presenting the past is fine, but pre-empting some future knowledge makes little sense to me.

Oh, I agree it's rarely a good choice, just saying it's possible.

Tommy has a very expressive face, people can easily read him. The hurt in his eyes was obvious to everyone in the room...

This can work, if characters know one another well enough to read one another's emotions reliably, and sometimes it's a good choice if one doesn't want to spend too long conveying information. But often it's preferable to think about how characters display those emotions and narrate the "how" instead.

John was angry.

vs.

John's face flushed red. "How dare you!" he snorted.

IMHO the latter is often more evocative. This is the standard in film; occasionally narration or soundtrack cues can help convey emotion (The Princess Bride uses this effectively) but it's much too heavy-handed to do those things constantly, so mostly audiences need to interpret emotion from affect.

It's also possible to bridge the two by providing the cue and the observer's interpretation:

John's voice was calm and level but his eye was twitching, the way it only did when he was furious and trying to keep it under control.

 

[Britva415]

That's as clunky as a square wheeled go cart for me. The narrator has just said he doesn't know something, so how can he know it? That's a logic fail to my eye - too much of that, and I'd be saying, just narrate the thing in third person. Presenting the past is fine, but pre-empting some future knowledge makes little sense to me.

He learned it later (after the dame walked in) and narrated it still later.

If it were written in present tense, it would be a logic fail.

 

[AG31]

I believe that a 3rd person narrator, especially if distant (i.e. not "close", as you defined it), can also tell the story from a PoV that's independent from any of the characters. Watching them from the side, so to speak.

Yes. Is there a term for that, anyone?

 

[AG31]

If so, is that a kind of fourth-wall breaking?

Thanks! So far I'm adding reliability and 4th wall breaking to my lexicon. (Or is it a taxonomy?)
I guess 4th wall breaking can only be a quality of 1st person POV. I find the Daniel Hawthorne stories of Anthony Horowitz just delightful. He's the screen writer for a lot of well known TV series and in his Hawthorne stories he's his fictionalized self. He mentions lots of true life details. That's breaking the 4th wall, right?

 

[AG31]

We have to be cautious about talking about points of view in a limited or exclusive sense. It's possible to play around with points of view and do almost anything.

For example, Philip Roth's Zuckerman novels are told from the first point of view of a writer named Zuckerman, but during the novel Zuckerman imaginatively reconstructs the points of view of third-person characters about whom he is narrating, so in effect it's a first person omniscient point of view. It's a blend of first-person and third-person that constantly raises the question in the reader's mind: how could Zuckerman know this?

I'm afraid you're making my brain hurt. But I think I'll check one of them out of the library to get some clarity.