Narrative voice

The narrative voice describes how the story is conveyed: for example, by "viewing" a
character's thought processes, reading a letter written for someone, retelling a character's
experiences, etc.

Stream-of-consciousness voice

Main article: Stream of consciousness (narrative mode)

A stream of consciousness gives the (typically first-person) narrator's perspective by attempting

to replicate the thought processesas opposed to simply the actions and spoken wordsof the
narrative character. Often, interior monologues and inner desires or motivations, as well as pieces
of incomplete thoughts, are expressed to the audience but not necessarily to other characters.
Examples include the multiple narrators' feelings in William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury
and As I Lay Dying, the character Offred's often fragmented thoughts in Margaret Atwood's The
Handmaid's Tale, and the development of the narrator's nightmarish experience in Queen's hit
song "Bohemian Rhapsody."

The creation of this mode of writing is often attributed[by whom?] to Irish writer James Joyce by
virtue of his novel Ulysses.

Character voice

One of the most common narrative voices, used especially with first- and third-person
viewpoints, is the character voice, in which a 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; rather, the narrator is a more relatable, realistic character who may or may not be involved
in the actions of the story and who may or may not take a biased approach in the storytelling. If
the character 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 Nick Carraway of The
Great Gatsby.

Unreliable voice

Main article: Unreliable narrator

Under the character voice is the unreliable narrative voice, which involves the use of a dubious
or untrustworthy narrator. This mode may be employed to give the audience a deliberate sense of
disbelief in the story or a level of suspicion or mystery as to what information is meant to be true
and what is to be false. This lack of reliability is often developed by the author to demonstrate
that the narrator is in some state of psychosis. The narrator of Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," for
example, is significantly biased, unknowledgeable, ignorant, childish, or is perhaps purposefully
trying to deceive the audience.[citation needed] Unreliable narrators are usually first-person narrators;
however, when a third-person narrator is considered unreliable for any reason, their viewpoint
may be termed "third-person, subjective".

Examples include Nelly Dean in Wuthering Heights, "Chief" Bromden in One Flew Over the
Cuckoo's Nest,[7] Holden Caulfield in the novel The Catcher In The Rye, Dr. James Sheppard in
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Stark in Only Forward, both John Shade and Charles Kinbote in
the novel Pale Fire[citation needed] and John Dowell in the novel The Good Soldier[citation needed].

A naive narrator is one who is so ignorant and inexperienced that they actually expose the faults
and issues of their world. This is used particularly in satire, whereby the user can draw more
inferences about the narrator's environment than the narrator. Child narrators can also fall under
this category.

Epistolary voice

Main article: Epistolary novel

The epistolary narrative voice uses a (usually fictional) series of letters and other documents to
convey the plot of the story. Although epistolary works can be considered multiple-person
narratives, they also can be classified separately, as they arguably have no narrator at alljust an
author who has gathered the documents together in one place. One famous example is Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein, which is a story written in a sequence of letters. Another is Bram Stoker's
Dracula, which tells the story in a series of diary entries, letters and newspaper clippings. Les
Liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons), by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, is again made up of
the correspondence between the main characters, most notably the Marquise de Merteuil and the
Vicomte de Valmont. Langston Hughes does the same thing in a shorter form in his story
"Passing", which consists of a young man's letter to his mother. In recent times, perhaps the most
critically acclaimed literary work employing this sort of narrative would be the song 'Stan' from
The Marshall Mathers LP by Eminem.

Third-person voices

The third-person narrative voices are narrative-voice techniques employed solely under the
category of the third-person view.

Third-person, subjective

The third-person subjective is when the narrator conveys the thoughts, feelings, opinions, etc.
of one or more characters. If there 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, except still giving personal descriptions using "he", "she", "it", and
"they", but not "I". This is almost always the main character (e.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). George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire is an example of a series
with each chapter presented from the point of view of one of the numerous characters. 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 20th century. In contrast to the broad, sweeping perspectives seen in many
19th-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

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 narrative mode 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 emphasize characters acting out their feelings observably. 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 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 plotmerely an uninvolved onlooker. It was also used around the mid-20th
century by French novelists writing in the nouveau roman tradition.[citation needed]

Third-person, omniscient

Historically, the third-person omniscient perspective has been the most commonly used; it is
seen in countless classic novels, including works by Jane Austen, Leo Tolstoy, and George Eliot.
A story in this narrative mode is presented by a narrator with an overarching point of view,
seeing and knowing everything that happens within the world of the story, including what each
of the characters is thinking and feeling.[8] It sometimes even takes a subjective approach. One
advantage of omniscience is that this mode enhances the sense of objective reliability (i.e.
truthfulness) of the plot. The third-person omniscient narrator is the least capable of being
unreliablealthough the omniscient narrator can have its own personality, offering judgments
and opinions on the behavior of the characters.

In addition to reinforcing the sense of the narrator as reliable (and thus of the story as true), the
main advantage of this mode is that it is eminently suited to telling huge, sweeping, epic stories,
and/or complicated stories involving numerous characters. The disadvantage of this mode is the
increased distance between the audience and the story, and the fact thatwhen used in
conjunction with a sweeping, epic "cast-of-thousands" storycharacterization tends to be
limited, thus reducing the reader's ability to identify with or sympathize with the characters. A
classic example of both the advantages and disadvantages of this mode is J. R. R. Tolkien's The
Lord of the Rings.

Some writers and literary critics make the distinction between the third-person omniscient and
the universal omniscient, the difference being that in the universal omniscient, the narrator
reveals information that the characters do not have. Usually, the universal omniscient reinforces
the idea of the narrator being unconnected to the events of the story.