Prose: Narration and Point of View

This is Unit Ten of Analyzing and Interpreting Literature, part one of two: prose begins, with narration and point of view. Unit nine closed the poetry band and said the paragraph now replaces the line. Here is this unit's governing idea, and it pays off on the most famous first sentence in English fiction: before anything in a prose passage can be judged, you need to know who is telling it and how much that teller can see, because the position of the voice determines what evidence is available, and a claim about a character and a claim about a narrator look alike on the page. We begin with the glossary's terms, point of view as a stance and narrator as a storyteller with nothing assumed. Then its five narrator types, more finely divided than most, and a two-question test that sorts them. Then six terms the glossary omits, chief among them free indirect discourse, the most examinable prose technique on the paper. Then Austen, whose stated fact turns out to be a report. Last, Brontë's narrator inside and afterwards, and Conrad's unnamed voice that hands the story on. By the end you will be able to define the glossary's terms. To sort the five types by two questions. To supply what the glossary omits and recognise free indirect discourse. To read Austen's irony with no ironic word. And to read Brontë's two time-frames and Conrad's frame.

Four entries to start: why the voice is settled before anything else, point of view as the glossary defines it, narrator in a single word, and the five types the glossary names.

Settle the voice before anything else.

AIL 0901 Why Narration Is the First Prose Question

Before anything in a prose passage can be judged, you need to know who is telling it and how much that teller can see. A claim about a character and a claim about a narrator look alike on the page and are different answers. Settle the voice first, because two different claims look alike here.

A position, and what it can see.

AIL 0902 Point of View, as the Anchor Defines It

The glossary gives point of view as the stance from which the storyteller or narrator tells the story. Stance is a position, so the question is always where the telling voice is standing in relation to the events. That position controls what can be reported, and position determines the evidence available.

Storyteller, and nothing assumed.

AIL 0903 Narrator

The glossary defines narrator in a single word: storyteller. That brevity is useful, because it makes no assumption about whether the narrator is a character, is trustworthy, or is present in the events. All three of those are separate questions, and three further questions stay open after the definition.

Five named types, not three.

AIL 0904 The Anchor's Five Narrator Types

The glossary names five: first-person major-character, first-person minor-character, limited omniscient, objective, and omniscient. That is a more detailed taxonomy than most short glossaries carry, and the exam's options are usually drawn from within it, so the exam draws from this range of five.

Seven entries on the five types: the two first-person kinds and why a writer chooses the minor one, the three third-person kinds, and the two questions that select among all five.

The teller is also the subject.

AIL 0905 First-Person Major-Character Narrator

The glossary defines this as a narrator telling a story in which he or she is the main character or main focus of attention. The teller is also the subject. Everything reaches the reader through someone with an interest in how it looks, so an interested party is doing the reporting.

Present, but not the subject.

AIL 0906 First-Person Minor-Character Narrator

The glossary describes this narrator as typically a gossip, observing another person's actions and reporting what that friend did, when, and to whom. The characterisation as gossip is the anchor's own colouring; the structural point is that the teller is present but not central. Gossip is the anchor's word, not a rule.

The reader watches two people.

AIL 0907 Why a Minor-Character Narrator Is Chosen

Putting the telling in a bystander's hands lets a writer keep the central figure partly unknown, and gives the reader a stated reaction to judge against. The reader watches two people: the subject, and the one reporting on him. Conrad's opening does exactly this, and the central figure stays partly unknown.

Outside the story, inside one mind.

AIL 0908 Limited Omniscient Narrator

The glossary defines this as a narrator who limits himself or herself to relaying the thoughts and actions of the main character only. Not a character in the story, but confined to one mind inside it. This is the commonest mode in modern fiction, and the commonest mode on the paper.

Behaviour and speech, no thoughts.

AIL 0909 Objective Narrator

The glossary says an objective narrator establishes setting in a precise but rather detached style and then lets the conversation tell the story. No thoughts are reported at all. The reader is given behaviour and speech and must infer everything interior, since everything interior is inferred.

All minds, at any time.

AIL 0910 Omniscient Narrator

The glossary defines this as a narrator able to tell the thoughts and actions of all characters at any time, adding that such a narrator is like a god providing all the information readers could want. Unrestricted access is the mark, and unrestricted access is the test to apply.

In the story? How many minds?

AIL 0911 A Test for Sorting the Five

Ask two questions. Is the teller a character in the events? Then, how many minds does the telling enter: none, one, or all? Those two answers select one of the five types with no recall required, and both are answerable from a single paragraph; two questions select the type.

Six entries on what the glossary omits: third-person narration as the umbrella, free indirect discourse and how to recognise it, the unreliable narrator, stream of consciousness, and narrative distance.

Three of the five are third-person.

AIL 0912 Third-Person Narration

The glossary has no headword for third-person narration, though three of its five types are third-person. The phrase names any telling that refers to characters as he, she or they rather than as I. Limited omniscient, objective and omniscient are all third-person modes, and the umbrella term is absent.

A character's thought, in the narrator's voice.

AIL 0913 Free Indirect Discourse

Free indirect discourse reports a character's thoughts in the narrator's third-person voice, without quotation marks or a said-she. The glossary has no headword for it. It is the most examinable prose technique on this paper, because it makes narrator and character hard to separate; the glossary omits the key technique.

Character's opinion, narrator's grammar.

AIL 0914 Recognising Free Indirect Discourse

Look for a sentence in third person and past tense that carries a judgment or a colouring only the character would supply. If the opinion belongs to the character but the grammar belongs to the narrator, the sentence is free indirect. Both worked prose passages below use it; the judgment marks it, not the tense.

The text gives reason to doubt.

AIL 0915 The Unreliable Narrator

An unreliable narrator reports in a way the text gives the reader reason to doubt. The glossary has no headword for it. Unit five built the apparatus on Browning's Duke: claims the teller cannot know, judgments outrunning the facts, and detail that undercuts its own purpose; unit five supplied the three tests.

Thought in its own order.

AIL 0916 Stream of Consciousness

Stream of consciousness renders thought as it occurs, in its own order and without tidying. The glossary has no headword for it. It differs from free indirect discourse in dispensing with the narrator's ordering, so the prose takes on the shape of the mind rather than of a sentence; no narrator is tidying it.

How near the voice stands.

AIL 0917 Narrative Distance

Distance is how near the telling stands to a character's own way of seeing, and it can change from sentence to sentence within one passage. The glossary has no term for it. Noticing a shift in distance is often what an exam question about a passage's development is asking for; it shifts within one passage.

Five entries on Austen: the universally acknowledged truth, whose truth it is, the opening as free indirect discourse on a whole community, the phrase rightful property, and the narrator classified.

It sounds like a stated fact.

AIL 0918 Austen's Universally Acknowledged Truth

Pride and Prejudice opens that it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. Want means need, the sense unit three trained. The sentence sounds like a narrator stating a fact, and want means need, not desire.

The neighbourhood's view, not the narrator's.

AIL 0919 Whose Truth Is It

The second paragraph says this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families that such a man is considered the rightful property of one of their daughters. The opinion is the neighbourhood's, not the narrator's. The first sentence was being reported, not asserted, and here the governing idea pays off.

Irony with no ironic word.

AIL 0920 Austen's Opening as Free Indirect Discourse

A collective opinion has been given in the narrator's own grammar, with no marker separating it. That is free indirect discourse operating on a whole community rather than one character, and it produces the irony without a single ironic word being used; the technique supplies the irony.

They convict themselves in their words.

AIL 0921 "Rightful Property"

The phrase rightful property is the sharpest thing in the opening, and it belongs to the families rather than to the narrator. Austen lets them convict themselves in their own vocabulary, which is the same mechanism unit five found in Browning's Duke, self-conviction in the speaker's own words.

Omniscient, and ironic with it.

AIL 0922 Which Type Is Austen's Narrator

Apply the two-question test: not a character in the events, and able to report the minds of the surrounding families collectively as well as the Bennets individually. That is the omniscient narrator of the glossary's definition, used ironically rather than as a god handing over facts; omniscient does not mean trustworthy.

Eight entries on Brontë and Conrad: a narrator inside the events, her type, an inversion, an aside that reveals two time-frames, and then Conrad's unnamed voice, the frame it opens, and what a frame achieves.

The narrator is inside the events.

AIL 0923 Brontë's First Sentence

Jane Eyre opens that there was no possibility of taking a walk that day. The first word after is we, then I, so the narrator is inside the events. No fact about the world is offered before a fact about the narrator's own situation; her situation comes before the world's.

Her story, told by her.

AIL 0924 A First-Person Major-Character Narrator

Jane tells her own story and is its main focus, which is the glossary's first-person major-character type exactly. Everything the reader learns arrives through someone whose interests are engaged in how it is understood, and that is a permanent condition of the book; the condition holds throughout.

Inversion places the emphasis.

AIL 0925 "Dreadful to Me Was the Coming Home"

Brontë inverts the clause, putting the predicate before the subject. Unit two taught that parse: the coming home was dreadful to me. The inversion throws the weight onto dreadful, which is the first word of feeling in the book and is placed for emphasis; unit two's parse is needed here.

Two time-frames in one sentence.

AIL 0926 The Aside About Mrs. Reed

A bracket interrupts to explain that Mrs. Reed dined early when there was no company. A child living the day would not stop to explain the household's habits. The aside belongs to an adult recalling, and it reveals two time-frames in one sentence; a child would not pause to explain.

The one who lived it, and the one telling.

AIL 0927 The Double Time-Frame

A retrospective first-person narrator is two people: the one who lived it and the one telling it afterwards. Which of the two a sentence belongs to is a genuine exam question, settled by whether it knows more than the child could; ask which of the two knows this.

Aboard, speaking, unnamed.

AIL 0928 Conrad's Unnamed Voice

Heart of Darkness opens with the Nellie, a cruising yawl, swinging to her anchor without a flutter of the sails. The next paragraph says the sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us. There is a narrator, he is aboard, and he is never named; the pronoun is us, not I.

One narrator handing over to another.

AIL 0929 The Frame Narrator

This voice exists to hand the story to someone else. Marlow will take it over and tell the bulk of the book, with the unnamed listener reporting him. That arrangement is a frame narrative, and the glossary has no headword for the term; the glossary omits frame narrative.

The reader watches the telling.

AIL 0930 What a Frame Achieves

A frame puts a listener between the reader and the tale, so the reader watches the telling as well as the events. Marlow's account arrives already received by someone, and how that someone takes it is part of the evidence the book offers; reception is part of the evidence.

That is the glossary's terms, the five types, the six supplied, Austen, Brontë and Conrad's frame, with the governing idea paid off on a first sentence that was a report. You can say why the voice is settled first, define point of view as a stance and narrator as a storyteller with nothing assumed, and name the glossary's five types. You can sort them by two questions, in the story and how many minds, and know that gossip is the anchor's colouring and not part of a definition. You can supply third-person narration, free indirect discourse with its rule that the judgment marks it, the unreliable narrator with unit five's three tests, stream of consciousness and narrative distance. You can read Austen's truth as the neighbourhood's, find the irony in rightful property with no ironic word, and classify her narrator as omniscient and not trustworthy. And you can read Brontë's we then I, her inversion, and her aside as two time-frames in one sentence, and Conrad's unnamed us as a frame that lets the reader watch the telling. Part two classifies that frame and works Joyce.