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The narrative mode (also known as the mode of narration) 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 assessments 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).
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Narrative point of view in the creative writing of fiction describes the narrator's position in relation to
the story being told. [1] 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 pointof-view in film refers to the view captured by the cameras optics. The viewpoint of a person or the
point-of-view of a camera is not analogous to narrative point of view in literature. [2]
First-person view
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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.
Second-person view
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Third-person view
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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-person), 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[citation needed] . 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".[5] 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". [citation needed]
If the narrator of the story is not present or is present but not a protagonist and a story told by
someone else and not his own, the story is narrated by He/She perspective.[6]
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 characterthat is, it cannot describe
things unknown to the focal character.
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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 [citation needed] to other
characters from time to time, rather than only the protagonist. However, like the A Song of Ice and
Fire series, a switch of viewpoint is done only at chapter boundaries. Omniscient point of view is also
referred to as alternating point of view [citation needed] , 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 novels, 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
flashbacks 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 Garca, 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
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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
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Character voice
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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 character: examples of supporting viewpoint characters include
Doctor Watson, Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Great Gatsby's Nick Carraway.
Unreliable voice
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Epistolary voice
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Third-person voices
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The third-person narrative voices are narrative-voice techniques employed solely under the category
of the third-person view.
Third-person, subjective
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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 protagonist) 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 charactere.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.
Third-person, objective
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The third-person objective employs a narrator who tells a story without describing any
character's thoughts, opinions, or feelings; instead it gives an objective, 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.
Third-person, omniscient
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Narrative tense
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The narrative tense or narrative time determines the grammatical tense of the story; whether
in the past, present, or future.
Past tense
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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 nowat the current momentin real-time. (e.g.
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"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.
Future tense
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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 prophetic feel. (e.g. "They will
drive happily. They will find their way and will prepare to celebrate.")
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Fiction-writing mode
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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, 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.
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Further reading
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Card, Orson Scott. Characters and Viewpoint. Cincinnati: Writer's Digest Books 1988.
Fludernik, Monika. Towards a "Natural" Narratology. London: Routledge 1996.
Genette, Grard. Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method. Transl. by Jane Lewin. Oxford:
Blackwell 1980 (Translation of Discours du rcit).
Stanzel, Franz Karl. A theory of Narrative. Transl. by Charlotte Goedsche. Cambridge: CUP 1984
(Transl. of Theorie des Erzhlens).
Ranjbar Vahid. (2011) The Narrator, Iran:Baqney
Notes
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2. ^ James McCracken, ed. (2011). The Oxford English Dictionary (Online ed.). The Oxford English
Dictionary. pp.Derived from multiple dictionary definitions and also film curricula. Retrieved October 16,
2011.
3. ^ Ranjbar Vahid. The Narrator, Iran:Baqney. 2011
4. ^ Miller, Laura (April 18, 2004). "We the Characters"
5. ^ Maxine Swann, "Flower Children"
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