1. NARRATION

2. Narration refers to the act of telling a story, whether in prose or in verse, and the means by which that telling is accomplished.

3. VOICE The narrator of a literary work is the one who tells the story. His or her identity differs from that of the author, because the narrator is always in some sense the author’s invention. The narrator often differs notably from the author in age, gender, outlook, or circumstances.

4. VOICE Twain’s Huck Finn is narrated by a barely literate teenage boy Langston Hughes’s dramatic monologue “Mother to Son” is narrated by a poor, aging woman Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” is told by a psychopathic murderer

5. VOICE In the previous works it is easy not to confuse the narrator with the author. In other cases, though, separating the author from the narrator is not so easy. When there is no clear distinction between the two, the narrator remains a quasi-fictional speaker, contrived for the purposes of the particular story.

6. VOICE Finally, the voice of the author, in the form of various convictions and values by which he or she judges characters and events as well as evokes judgments in the reader, stands behind every fictional narrative.

7. POINT OF VIEW Point of view can be identified by the pronoun that the narrator uses to recount events. “I” (or occasionally “we”) for first-person “He,” “She,” “They” for third-person “You” for the rarely used second-person

8. FIRST-PERSON The first-person point of view has the advantages of immediacy and directness. It invites the reader to engage with a speaker who seems to be relating first-hand experience. In the following passage, Huck Finn, who has been living the hardscrabble but unconfined life of a homeless orphan, describes the trials of undergoing the kindly widow Douglas’s attempts to “sivilize” him:

9. FIRST-PERSON: HUCK FINN The widow she cried over me, and called me a poor lost lamb, and she called me a lot of other names, too, but she never meant no harm by it. She put me in them new clothes again, and I couldn’t do nothing but sweat and sweat, and feel all cramped up. Well, then the old thing commenced again. The widow rung a bell for supper, and you had to come to time. When you got to the table you couldn’t go right to eating, but you had to wait for the widow to tuck down her head and grumble a little over the victuals, though there warn’t really anything the matter with them. That is, nothing only everything was cooked by itself. In a barrel of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and things go better.

10. FIRST-PERSON: HUCK FINN The narration has a freshness and authenticity, from Huck’s homely idioms to his restlessness under the regimen imposed by the social graces to his mistaking of the widow’s saying of grace at the table for “grumbling.”

11. FIRST-PERSON The first-person also imposes limitations on the teller, however: The narrator can only relate what he or she might have witnessed, and then only with the degree of understanding and objectivity appropriate to his or her circumstances and character.

12. FIRST-PERSON A narrator who is a child, such as Huck Finn, or whose mind is afflicted, such as Poe’s paranoid speaker, cannot convincingly present a situation with the depth or subtlety of a more sophisticated or better balanced speaker. Nor can a first-person narrator logically describe the process of his or her own death. Epistolary novel—first-person narration told in the form of letters.

13. THIRD-PERSON The third-person point of view presents a narrator that has a much broader view, and usually, an objective perspective on characters and events. Third-person narration falls into two major subtypes.

14. OMNISCIENT An omniscient third-person narrator can enter the consciousness of any character, evaluate motives and explain feelings, and recount the background and predict the outcome of situations.

15. LIMITED A limited third-person narrator involves a narrator who describes events only from the perspective and with the understanding of one, or sometimes, a select few characters.

16. OMNISCIENT EXAMPLE George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872) is a story that takes place in Victorian England that takes us into the thoughts and motives of a wide variety of characters during courtship and marriage and covers such broad social issues as political activism, religion, the ethics of financial investment, women’s rights, and the development of medical science.

17. MORE OMNISCIENT Stephen Crane’s short story “The Open Boat” (1897- 98) follows the fortunes of four shipwrecked men as they try to reach land safely in their small lifeboat E.M. Forester’s A Passage to India (1924) recounts the complex tensions and bonds among various English officials and tourists and the native Indian population during the British Raj. Here is a passage from Forester’s novel in which the all-knowing narrator reveals the chance circumstances and misunderstandings that lead to the disastrous Anglo-Indian excursion at the heart of the book:

18. A PASSAGE TO INDIA These hills look romantic in certain lights and at suitable distances, and seen of an evening from the upper verandah of the club they caused Miss Quested to say conversationally to Miss Derek that she should like to have gone, and that Dr. Aziz at Mr. Fielding’s had said he would arrange something, and that Indians seem rather forgetful. She was overheard by the servant who offered them vermouths. This servant understood English. And he was not exactly a spy, but he kept his ears open, and Mahmoud Ali did not exactly bribe him, but did encourage him to come and squat with his own servants, and would happen to stroll their way when he was there. As the story traveled, it accreted emotion and Aziz learnt with horror that the ladies were deeply offended with him, and expected an invitation daily. He thought his facile remark had been forgotten. Endowed with two memories, a temporary and a permanent, he had hitherto relegated the caves to the former. Now he transferred them once and for all, and pushed the matter through. They were to be a splendid replica of the tea party.

19. A PASSAGE TO INDIA The narrator is omniscient because it is assumed that he knows and can reveal everything about these characters and their situations. – From the off-handed nature of the Englishwoman’s remark to the means by which it is overheard by an eavesdropping servant to the grapevine of gossip by which it reaches, in greatly exaggeration form, the original source of the invitation. – He also takes us into the consciousness of Dr. Aziz, to disclose both the well-meaning casualness with which he had offered to show the English ladies the hills and his eager resolve to set things right.

20. MORE OMNISCIENT The advantages of the omniscient point of view are the aura of wisdom and authority that it suggests and the unlimited range of material that it can cover. It can, however, create a feeling of distance, and so reduce the degree of connection between readers and characters.

21. OMNISCIENT: INTRUSIVE An omniscient narrator who offers philosophical or moral commentary on the characters and the events he depicts is called an intrusive narrator. Especially popular in nineteenth-century fiction.

22. EXAMPLE In William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, the narration is punctuated by sly, often ironic judgments on the motives and actions of the characters as well as on contemporary mores. After quoting a long, obsequious speech to a wealthy heiress by a man eager to gain her friendship for himself and his daughters, the narrator interrupts the story to comment:

23. EXAMPLE There is little doubt that old Osborne believed all he said, and that the girls were quite earnest in their protestations of affection for Miss Swartz. People in Vanity Fair fasten on to rich folks quite naturally. If the simplest people are disposed to look not a little kindly on great Prosperity, (for I defy any member of the British public to say that the notion of Wealth has not something awful and pleasing to him; and you, if you are told that the man next to you at dinner has got half a million, not to look at him with a certain interest;)—if the simple look benevolently on money, how much more do your old worldlings regard it! Their affections rush out to meet and welcome money.

24. EXPLANATION OF EXAMPLE The narrator’s irony is signaled by his exposure of the real motive for Osborne’s sudden “affection” in Miss Swartz’s “Wealth,” capitalized along with “Prosperity” for extra emphasis. Also, he extends the target of his satire to involve not only the “people in Vanity Fair,” the stereotype of society that he is depicting, but “any member of the British public,” including, in a sudden shift to the second-person point of view, the reader at a hypothetical dinner party.

25. THIRD-PERSON OBJECTIVE A third-person narrator whose presence is merely implied is called an objective narrator. That subtler technique, more favored in recent times, is exemplified in such works as Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant (1957), a novel about a lonely young drifter who is inspired by his relationship with a warm Jewish family to change his religion and way of life. It is also prevalent in many works by Hemingway.

26. THIRD-PERSON OBJECTIVE In Hemingway’s short story, “The End of Something,” the protagonist, Nick Adams, has just admitted to his girlfriend that he no longer loves her. They have been fishing, and she responds only that she is going to take the rowboat back while he walks. He offers to push it off for her, and the story ends with the following section:

27. EXAMPLE “You don’t need to,” she said. She was afloat in the boat on the water with the moonlight on it. Nick went back and lay down with his face in the blanket by the fire. He could hear Marjorie rowing on the water. Hey lay there for a long time. He lay there while he heard Bill come into the clearing, walking around the woods. He felt Bill come up to the fire. Bill didn’t touch him, either. “Did she go all right?” Bill said. “Oh, yes,” Nick said, lying, his face in the blanket. “Have a scene?” “No, there wasn’t any scene.” “How do you feel?” “Oh, go away, Bill! Go away for a while.” Bill selected a sandwich from the lunch basket and walked over to have a look at the rods.

28. EXAMPLE EXPLAINED We are left to infer the characters’ feelings from the spare, matter-of-fact report of their dialogue and their actions: Nick’s depression and guilt over the breakup, signaled especially by his prone position, hiding his face in the blanket, and by his curt replies; Marjorie’s hurt and determination not to react; and Bill’s half well-meaning, half prying curiosity, which provokes Nick’s irritation.

29. NARRATION IN DRAMA In drama, there is usually no intermediary between audience and characters; each of the characters speaks in an individual voice, which the author has created for him or her. The exception is a narrator in a play, a character who stands outside the action and comments on the characters and events, addressing the audience directly.

30. EXAMPLE In Tennessee William’s The Glass Menagerie, the narrator, Tom Wingfield, is an older version of the character Tom in the main plot. He is depicted as recounting his memories of his dysfunctional family. He keeps pausing the action to foreshadow events and evaluate the feelings and motives of the characters, including his younger self.

31. EXAMPLE In Shakespeare’s Henry V, there is a Chorus—a single person whose initial function is to urge the audience to use their imaginations in order to attain what the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge would later term a “willing suspension of disbelief” and persuade themselves that they are seeing not actors performing in the lowly “wooden O” of the Globe Theatre but the “vasty fields of France” and the “two mighty monarchies” that the play will depict.

32. EXAMPLE As the action continues, the functions of the Chorus become more diverse. He appears before each of the five acts and at the end, in the Epilogue, to bridge distances in time and place, create suspense about upcoming conflicts, pass judgment on characters and events, and, above all, glorify the play’s hero, “this Star of England.”

33. EXAMPLE By Shakespeare’s day, Henry V had been dead nearly two hundred years and, in his capacity as the last English king to rule both England and France, was lionized. The play itself presents a considerably more complex, less idealized depiction of Henry, but the Chorus continually speaks in the voice of the king’s champion; he is perhaps Shakespeare’s concession to both popular appeal and to the court censors.

34. MORE LIMITED STUFF Remember, a limited point of view restricts the point of view to the understanding and experience of one or, in some cases, of a few characters. One example is in James Joyce’s “A Painful Case,” which focuses on the perspective of a wizened intellectual who discovers too late that he has rejected the one person who has ever loved him.

35. EXAMPLE In the following scene, the protagonist, Mr. Duffy, is reacting to a newspaper account of the woman’s death, which includes the information that in the four years since he ended their relationship, she has continued to be neglected by her husband and grown daughter, taken to drink, and died by walking in front of a train:

36. EXAMPLE As he sat there, living over his life with her and evoking alternately the two images in which he now conceived her, he realized that she was dead, that she had ceased to exist, that she had become a memory. He began to feel ill at ease. He asked himself what else could he have done. He could not have lived with her openly. He had done what seemed to him best. How was he to blame? Now that she was gone he understood how lonely her life must have been, sitting night after night alone in that room. His life would be lonely too until he, too, died, ceased to exist, became a memory—if anyone remembered him.

37. EXAMPLE EXPLAINED The limited perspective follows Duffy from growing discomfort with his former self-righteousness to a first realization of his own guilt to sudden empathy for the woman’s situation to the realization that has doomed himself to share her terrible loneliness.

38. STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS An extreme form of the third-person limited point of view is the stream of consciousness technique, which is used to replicate the thought processes of a character, with little or no intervention by the narrator. The running meditation may include sensory impressions, memories, opinions, and insights, organized by free association, in just the digressive form that it might follow in real life.

39. STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS Some authors that favored stream of consciousness include – William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury – James Joyce Ulysses – A man named Leopold Bloom is not a classical Greek hero, but a middle class Irish Jew – He doesn’t wander for 10 years across the Mediterranean, but through Dublin for a single day, June 16, 1904. – His wife is not a paragon of devotion, like Penelope, but the promiscuous Molly, whom he nevertheless loves passionately:

40. EXAMPLE …Rover cycleshop. Those races are on today. How long ago is that? Year Phil Gilligan died. We were in Lombard street west. Wait, was in Thom’s. Got the job in Wisdom Hely’s year we married. Six years. Ten years ago: ninety-four he died, yes that’s right the big fire at Arnott’s. Val Dillon was lord mayor. The Glencree dinner. Alderman Robert O’Reilly emptying the port into his soup before the flag fell, Bobbob lapping it for the inner alderman. Couldn’t hear what the band played. For what we have already received may the Lord make us. Milly was a kiddy then. Molly had the elephantgrey dress with the braided frogs. Mantailored with selfcovered buttons. She didn’t like it because I sprained my ankle first day she wore choir picnic at the Sugarloaf. As if that. Old Goodwin’s tall hat done up with some sticky stuff. Flies’ picnic too. Never put a dress on her back like it. Fitted her like a glove, shoulder and hips. Just beginning to plump it out well. Rabbitpie we had that day. People looking after her. Happy. Happier then. Snug little room that was with the red wallpaper, Dockrell’s, one and ninepence a dozen. Milly’s tubbing night. American soap I bought: elderflower. Cosy smell of her bathwater. Funny she looked soaped all over. Shapely too. Now photography. Poor papa’s daguerreotype atelier he told me of. Hereditary taste.

41. EXAMPLE EXPLAINED The allusive, highly subjective nature of the style leaves some points unclear, such as personal references, many of which are explained elsewhere in the book, and peculiarly Irish institutions. For example, “Milly” is the Blooms’ daughter, now a teenager, and the “photography” reference is to her new job in a photographer’s shop. The political offices mentioned—”lord mayor” and “alderman”— refer to the city government, and the businesses, such as “Wisdom Hely’s,” to local establishments. The style is fragmented and elliptical, sentences like the grace said at the dinner and Bloom’s dismissal of the basis for Molly’s superstition about the bad luck she associated with her dress (“As if that”) are left incomplete.

42. EXAMPLE EXPLAINED The characterization of Bloom that emerges from this process is moving and believable: the way that he measures the passing of time by means of ordinary events in his life, relishes the memory of his young wife’s budding voluptuousness and of a dress that was especially flattering to it, and cherishes a recollection of his child’s bath night, when she was snug and secure and the couple united, “happier then” than they are in the troublesome present. We also experience first-hand Bloom’s sense of humor—his amusement at the slapstick of “Bobbob” “lapping” the port with which he has spiked his soup for the sake of his “inner alderman”—as well as his responsiveness to physical sensations in the description of Molly’s clinging “elephantgrey” dress and the “cosy smell” of Milly’s soapy bath water.

43. EXAMPLE EXPLAINED His humane sympathies also come out, in his tender recollection of the little Milly and of his “poor papa,” the sadness tempered by the consolation that his father has bequeathed to his granddaughter his interest in photography. The freshness and scope allowed by such direct access to his thought process—in the next paragraph, Bloom himself calls it a “stream of life”—help make him a fully three-dimensional and highly appealing character.

44. FINAL THOUGHTS ON 3 RD PERSON LIMITED The third-person limited has the advantages of both the immediacy of the first person and the authority and range of the third person omniscient. It is the most frequently used point of view.

45. SECOND-PERSON The third major point of view is the second-person, in which the narrator addresses the audience directly using the pronoun “you,” and assumes that the audience is experiencing the events along with the narrator. The implied audience may be the reader, a character who appears later in the story, or a listener who is never identified, such as a therapist in whom the narrator is confiding.

46. SECOND-PERSON It occurs most frequently as a temporary departure from one of the other points of view.

47. EXAMPLE Holden Caufield, the troubled teenage first-person narrator in The Catcher in the Rye, introduces the younger sister he adores and then says several times with uncharacterized enthusiasm, “You’d like her…I swear to God you’d like her.” Whether Holden is speaking to a sympathetic reader or to one of the doctors at the “crumby place” where he tells us on the first page, he has been sent to recover from “some madman stuff” he has suffered, the shift in both his perspective and his attitude are striking.

48. EXAMPLE John Cheever’s “The Swimmer” is a third-person limited story about an apparently carefree suburbanite who decides to return home after an afternoon poolside party by swimming across the intervening pools owned by his neighbors. One of the first hints of the devastating truth about his situation comes in a sudden switch to the second-person point of view as he waits to cross a busy, littered highway:

49. EXAMPLE Had you gone for a Sunday afternoon ride that day you might have seen him, close to naked, standing on the shoulders of Route 424, waiting for a chance to cross. You might have wondered if he was the victim of foul play, had his car broken down, or was he merely a fool. His vulnerability and isolation foreshadow the terrible emptiness that awaits him at his journey’s end.

50. SECOND PERSON The use of second-person point of view is relatively rare. While it has the immediacy of the first-person, it can have the off-putting effects of seeming highly self- conscious and of calling constant attention to the process of narration. It also limits the kinds of scenes that can effectively be related through such constant back-and-forth involvement between narrator and audience.

51. EL FIN