Narration and Point of Viewby Bill Bowler |
Part 1 Part 3 appear in this issue. |
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Third-Person Narration The Third-Person Narrator Reliability in Third Person: Omniscient Narration Shifting POV in Third Person The Image of the Author Digressions |
Third-Person Narration
Third-person narration, narration in “he,” is historically one of the two major modes of narration in literary practice (the other being first person). Third-person narration tends to shift emphasis away from the impersonal narrator (addressor), and away from the reader (addressee), towards the events and characters of the story itself (code and message),
The volcano that had reared Tratua up from the Pacific depths had been sleeping now for half a million years. Yet in a little while, thought Reinhold, the island would be bathed with fires fiercer than any that had attended its birth....
— Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End
The Third-Person Narrator
In third person, the narrator is distinguished from the characters as a separate entity. The third-person narrator exists and functions on a separate fictional level, superimposed, as it were, on the level of story characters and events. He is not one of the characters; he does not directly interact with them, engage them in dialog, or participate in the events of the story.
As in first person, the third-person narrator is a fictional teller of the story but, as a non-character, his role is limited to describing, observing and commenting; he is proscribed from participating.
In the first person, the narrator is a character in the story. In the second person, the reader becomes an imaginary character. In the third person, the narrator is not a character at all but a surrogate for the author.
Third-person narration interposes what is called “esthetic distance” between the reader and the story; that is, events are relayed to the reader by a third party’s account of them.
First-person narration has no esthetic distance at all: we get the story first-hand.
Second person has esthetic distance to the degree of disbelief: how easy or hard is it for the readers to imagine themselves as a character in the story?
It is primarily in third-person narration that esthetic distance causes writers go astray and receive the editor’s admonition to “stick close to the action or lose the reader.”
Since the author’s goal is to immerse his reader in the fictional world, and the reader’s goal is to immerse himself there, it is, at best, risky business to increase the distance between the reader and the story and to interpose things between them. But “it’s the singer, not the song,” — and this is what redeems third-person narration when employed successfully: the reader’s identification with the narrator, which renders the layer of narration “transparent.”
Reliability in Third Person: Omniscient Narration
One of the greatest distinguishing characteristics of third-person narration, one of its great strengths (or weaknesses, if poorly implemented), is its capacity for omniscience, that is, for all-encompassing knowledge, absolute reliability, and complete veracity (within the story).
The first-person narrator can be “right” or “wrong” within the story and the reader must constantly evaluate and judge the narration on the basis of his knowledge of the qualities of the narrator. The first-person narrator can lie; he can misunderstand; he can fail to know. Events can take place of which he is completely unaware. Other characters can deceive him.
The omniscient third-person narrator, however, is the story’s equivalent of God and moves the characters about for his own purposes like pieces on a chessboard or puppets on a string. The omniscient third-person narrator knows everything: every event, every thought of every character, the meaning of everything. Nothing in the story escapes his purview.
The third-person omniscient narrator can only be “wrong” “outside” of the story, in the reader’s judgment of the story’s veracity as compared to real life. The reader can disagree with the author and say, “that story was a heap of lies,” but within the story itself, omniscient narration is infallible. It depicts the “actual” events and “true” motives of the characters (and not the first-person narrator’s opinion or guess at what they might be).
This godlike omniscience and control of the story is a double-edged sword. The complete knowledge of all of the characters’ secret thoughts; the ability to depict any and all events, whenever and wherever they occur, regardless of the location or knowledge or POV of any character — this gives the narrator the freedom to convey any piece of information (story content) he needs for purposes of plot advancement or characterization. There is no dispelling of the fictional illusion if he tells the reader something no character can be aware of.
In the following example, the first paragraph is objective third-person narration: it reports facts. The second paragraph shows what omniscient narration can do: it transcends the comic futility of the first paragraph and plumbs the souls of Léon and Emma Bovary alike with searing irony:
Each time, Léon had to tell her everything he had done since their last rendezvous. She asked for a poem, [...] a love piece written in her honor: he could never find a rhyme for the second line and ended up copying a sonnet from a keepsake.
He did that less out of vanity than out of a desire to please her. He never disputed any of her ideas; he fell in with all her tastes; he was becoming her mistress far more than she was his. Her sweet words and her kisses swept away his soul. Her depravity was so deep and so dissembled as to be almost intangible: where could she have learned it?
— Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
(tr. Francis Steegmuller)
Many of the authors cited in this essay, especially Flaubert, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, are towering geniuses; they can use omniscience as much as they want, and the reader will follow with fascination.
However, omniscient narration, in its capacity to solve all problems with a wave of the hand, can seem too easy in the hands of an amateur, too much like just “telling” and not “showing.” The reader may lose interest if it seems the author is simply dishing out information.
At worst, the amateur uses omniscience for its own sake and gives no information at all. Here’s a fictitious example of the “superfluous footnote” we see all too often in submissions to Bewildering Stories:
“Ouch,” said Tom painfully as he picked himself up off the ground. “I really must remember to tie my shoes.” Tom had an unfortunate habit of tripping over his own shoelaces.
Shifting POV in Third Person
Another characteristic, and great strength, of third-person narration is the complete freeing of POV from restriction. With a wave of the third person wand, all technical problems of POV are solved.
If the author wants to convey an event — 1,000 years in the past; 1,000 years in the future; at the bottom of the sea; on Pluto — he doesn’t have to worry about the mechanics of getting a character in sight of it or providing some in-story fictional mechanism for a character to access the event (such as an ancient manuscript or a satellite feed).
If the author wants to convey to the reader the secret thoughts or motives of a character, he doesn’t have to arrange for another character to eavesdrop or find a diary.
In third-person omniscient, the author can shift POV at will from character to character or from character to narrator, as necessary to advance the story. Any information the author needs to provide the reader — an event, a character’s true motives, background information or the meaning of any story element — can simply be told from omniscient POV.
The narrative POV can be detailed, street level, microscopic; or it can ascend to the aerial and panoramic, even cosmic. Unlike a character, the third-person narrator has no “actual” location in the story (since he functions on a separate fictional level). Nothing blocks his view. Nothing in the story can remain hidden from him on the basis of time or space.
The disadvantage is that such narration is remote and becomes impersonal. The reader is listening (reading) patiently but at one remove from the story, hearing of the characters but not directly sharing their experiences. The reader is told what they say, but the account is second-hand; the reader does not hear the voices himself. As a result, the fictional illusion of the story may be diluted or dispelled; the reader may become uninvolved and lose interest. (Welcome to the “infodump.”)
The Image of the Author
The language of the third-person narrator and the nature of his comments and observations create an image of the narrator that exists and functions in the story apart from the characters. It is this image of the omniscient third-person narrator that the reader most often confuses with the author himself and is the most common source of the authorial fallacy.
Digressions
Another characteristic of third-person narration is the dreaded digression, that is, narration that is à propos of an event or character in the story but diverges from the story line, is not directly related to it, and does not serve to advance the plot.
In commenting on the action or characters, the third-person narrator is free to depart from the story line and roam far and wide. In the great novels of the 19th century, in the works of Victor Hugo, for just one example, there are famous passages of authorial digression, which are themselves considered models of essay.
However, one traditional use of digression is, in fact, plot-related: its use as a device to “tease” the reader. The author establishes plot tension (“he raised the gun, aimed...”) and then, rather than pulling the trigger, the narrator departs from the plot line and digresses on some subject. The reader is propelled through the digression by his desire to reach the plot again and find out what happens. The idea is to sustain the plot tension by delaying resolution.
However, the author must beware: digressions are rocky shoals. Here again, the editor warns the author, “stay close to the action, or lose the reader.” Digress too far and too long from the plot and action, and the reader, who just moments before had been hanging on your every word and wondering desperately what happens next, will close the book and go make himself a sandwich.
Plot tension and action are what stimulates the reader. They are the sweets that gratify the reader’s cravings. This is why pure entertainment — pulp novels, and Hollywood movies — are all action with no digression and little or no characterization. Rambo has no existential crisis and very few observations; he has an M-16.
Copyright © 2006 by Bill Bowler
