Allegory A symbolic narrative in which the surface details imply a secondary meaning.

Allegory often
takes the form of a story in which the characters represent moral qualities. The most famous
example in English is John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, in which the name of the central character,
Pilgrim, epitomizes the book's allegorical nature. Kay Boyle's story "Astronomer's Wife" and
Christina Rossetti's poem "Up-Hill" both contain allegorical elements.

Allusion A reference in a literary work to a person, place, or thing in history or another work of
literature.

Antagonist A character or force against which another character struggles. Creon is Antigone's
antagonist in Sophocles' play Antigone; Teiresias is the antagonist of Oedipus in Sophocles' Oedipus
the King.

Character An imaginary person that inhabits a literary work. Literary characters may be major or
minor, static (unchanging) or dynamic (capable of change).

Characterization The means by which writers present and reveal character. Although techniques of
characterization are complex, writers typically reveal characters through their speech, dress,
manner, and actions.

Climax The turning point of the action in the plot of a play or story. The climax represents the point
of greatest tension in the work.

Complication An intensification of the conflict in a story or play. Complication builds up,

accumulates, and develops the primary or central conflict in a literary work.

Conflict A struggle between opposing forces in a story or play, usually resolved by the end of the
work. The conflict may occur within a character as well as between characters.

Convention A customary feature of a literary work, such as the use of a chorus in Greek tragedy, the
inclusion of an explicit moral in a fable, or the use of a particular rhyme scheme in a villanelle.
Literary conventions are defining features of particular literary genres, such as novel, short story,
ballad, sonnet, and play.

Dnouement The resolution of the plot of a literary work.

Dialogue The conversation of characters in a literary work. In fiction, dialogue is typically enclosed
within quotation marks. In plays, characters' speech is preceded by their names.

Diction The selection of words in a literary work. A work's diction forms one of its centrally
important literary elements, as writers use words to convey action, reveal character, imply
attitudes, identify themes, and suggest values.

Dramatic irony Where the audience or reader is aware of something important, of which the
characters in the story are not aware.

Exposition The first stage of a fictional or dramatic plot, in which necessary background information
is provided.
Falling action In the plot of a story or play, the action following the climax of the work that moves it
towards its denouement or resolution.

Fiction An imagined story, whether in prose, poetry, or drama. Ibsen's Nora is fictional, a "make-
believe" character in a play, as are Hamlet and Othello. Characters like Robert Browning's Duke and
Duchess from his poem "My Last Duchess" are fictional as well, though they may be based on actual
historical individuals. And, of course, characters in stories and novels are fictional, though they, too,
may be based, in some way, on real people. The important thing to remember is that writers
embellish and embroider and alter actual life when they use real life as the basis for their work.
They fictionalize facts, and deviate from real-life situations as they "make things up."

Figurative language A form of language use in which writers and speakers convey something other
than the literal meaning of their words. Examples include hyperbole or exaggeration, litotes or
understatement, simile and metaphor, which employ comparison, and synecdoche and metonymy,
in which a part of a thing stands for the whole.

Flashback An interruption of a work's chronology to describe or present an incident that occurred

prior to the main time frame of a work's action. Writers use flashbacks to complicate the sense of
chronology in the plot of their works and to convey the richness of the experience of human time.

Flat Character Someone who is characterized by one or two traits. "Flat" and "round" were terms
first proposed by E.M. Forster in his Aspects of the Novel and they are often misapplied by modern
critics. Flat is especially corrupted when used as a synonym for cardboard; in Forster's usage, flat is
not a derogatory term. Rather, it describes a character who can be summed up in a sentence.
Gollum from The Lord of the Rings is a wonderful character who is absolutely flat in that his
character is determined by his obsession with the recovery of the ring, "his precious." Every story
needs some flat characters and many successful stories, for instance Charles Dickens' Christmas
Carol, have nothing but flat characters.

Foil A character who contrasts and parallels the main character in a play or story. Laertes, in
Hamlet, is a foil for the main character; in Othello, Emilia and Bianca are foils for Desdemona.

Foreshadowing Where future events in a story, or perhaps the outcome, are suggested by the
author before they happen. Foreshadowing can take many forms and be accomplished in many
ways, with varying degrees of subtlety. However, if the outcome is deliberately and explicitly
revealed early in a story (such as by the use of a narrator or flashback structure), such information
does not constitute foreshadow.

Freytag's Pyramid A way to analyze a plot that consists of five elements in an ascending and
descending manner. In the exposition, the plot, characters, and complication are introduced. The
complication marks the beginning of the action, something happens to begin the action, usually
single event that signals the beginning of the main conflict. This leads to the rising action, or the
events that lead to the climax of the plot. At the point of highest dramatic tension, or at a major
turning point in the plot, the audience finds the climax. This decisive moment in the narrative is
when the rising action is reversed to falling action. The falling action, then, is made up of the events
that follow the climax and lead to the dnouement. The final outcome, result, or unraveling of the
main dramatic complication is called the dnouement. The dnouement may involve a reversal in
the protagonist's fortunes, usually as the result of a discovery (recognition of something of great
importance previously unknown) by the protagonist. (Go to Freytag's Pyramid page.)
Image A concrete representation of a sense impression, a feeling, or an idea. Imagery refers to the
pattern of related details in a work. In some works one image predominates either by recurring
throughout the work or by appearing at a critical point in the plot. Often writers use multiple
images throughout a work to suggest states of feeling and to convey implications of thought and
action. Some modern poets, such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, write poems that lack
discursive explanation entirely and include only images. Among the most famous examples is
Pound's poem "In a Station of the Metro":

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

Imagery The pattern of related comparative aspects of language, particularly of images, in a literary
work. Imagery of light and darkness pervade James Joyce's stories "Araby," "The Boarding House,"
and "The Dead." So, too, does religious imagery.

Irony A contrast or discrepancy between what is said and what is meant or between what happens
and what is expected to happen in life and in literature. In verbal irony, characters say the opposite
of what they mean. In irony of circumstance or situation, the opposite of what is expected occurs.
In dramatic irony, a character speaks in ignorance of a situation or event known to the audience or
to the other characters.

Metaphor A comparison between essentially unlike things without an explicitly comparative word
such as like or as. An example is "My love is a red, red rose."

Mood The atmosphere or emotional condition created by the piece, within the setting.

Motif A recurring object, concept, or structure in a work of literature.

Narrative A collection of events that tells a story, which may be true or not, placed in a particular
order and recounted through either telling or writing.

Narrator The voice and implied speaker of a fictional work, to be distinguished from the actual living
author. See also Point of view.

In literature and film, an unreliable narrator is a literary device in which the credibility of the
narrator is seriously compromised. This unreliability can be due to psychological instability, a
powerful bias, a lack of knowledge, or even a deliberate attempt to deceive the reader or audience.
Unreliable narrators are usually first-person narrators, but third-person narrators can also be
unreliable.

Personification The endowment of inanimate objects or abstract concepts with animate or living
qualities. An example: "The yellow leaves flaunted their color gaily in the breeze."

Plot The unified structure of incidents in a literary work. See Conflict, Climax, Denouement, and
Flashback. [Abrams]

Point of view The angle of vision from which a story is narrated. See Narrator. A work's point of view
can be: first person, in which the narrator is a character or an observer, respectively; objective, in
which the narrator knows or appears to know no more than the reader; omniscient, in which the
narrator knows everything about the characters; and limited omniscient, which allows the narrator
to know some things about the characters but not everything.
Protagonist The main character of a literary work--Hamlet and Othello in the plays named after
them, Gregor Samsa in Kafka's Metamorphosis, Paul in Lawrence's "Rocking-Horse Winner."

Recognition The point at which a character understands his or her situation as it really is. Sophocles'
Oedipus comes to this point near the end of Oedipus the King; Othello comes to a similar
understanding of his situation in Act V of Othello.

Resolution The sorting out or unraveling of a plot at the end of a play, novel, or story. See Plot.

Reversal The point at which the action of the plot turns in an unexpected direction for the
protagonist. Oedipus's and Othello's recognitions are also reversals. They learn what they did not
expect to learn. See Recognition and also Irony.

Rising action A set of conflicts and crises that constitute the part of a play's or story's plot leading up
to the climax. See Climax, Denouement, and Plot.

Round Character One who is complex and perhaps even contradictory. E. M. Forster (see Flat
Characters) put it succinctly, "The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a
convincing way." If a flat character can be summed up in a sentence or two, a round character
would probably take an essay. For example, Genly Ai in The Left Hand of Darkness is one of the of
Ursula Le Guin's many round characters.

Setting The time and place of a literary work that establish its context. The stories of Sandra
Cisneros are set in the American southwest in the mid to late 20th century, those of James Joyce in
Dublin, Ireland in the early 20th century. (Go to Setting page.)

Style The way an author chooses words, arranges them in sentences or in lines of dialogue or verse,
and develops ideas and actions with description, imagery, and other literary techniques. See
Connotation, Denotation, Diction, Figurative language, Image, Imagery, Irony, Metaphor, Narrator,
Point of view, Syntax, and Tone.

Subject What a story or play is about; to be distinguished from plot and theme. Faulkner's "A Rose
for Emily" is about the decline of a particular way of life endemic to the American south before the
civil war. Its plot concerns how Faulkner describes and organizes the actions of the story's
characters. Its theme is the overall meaning Faulkner conveys.

Subplot A subsidiary or subordinate or parallel plot in a play or story that coexists with the main
plot. The story of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern forms a subplot with the overall plot of Hamlet.

Symbol An object or action in a literary work that means more than itself, that stands for something
beyond itself.

Theme The idea of a literary work abstracted from its details of language, character, and action, and
cast in the form of a generalization

Tone The implied attitude of a writer toward the subject and characters of a work. See Irony.

Tragic hero/tragic figure A protagonist who comes to a bad end as a result of his own behavior,
usually cased by a specific personality disorder or character flaw.
Freytag's Pyramid

1. Exposition: setting the scene. The writer introduces the characters and setting, providing
description and background.

2. Inciting Incident: something happens to begin the action. A single event usually signals the
beginning of the main conflict. The inciting incident is sometimes called 'the complication'.

3. Rising Action: the story builds and gets more exciting.

4. Climax: the moment of greatest tension in a story. This is often the most exciting event. It is
the event that the rising action builds up to and that the falling action follows.

5. Falling Action: events happen as a result of the climax and we know that the story will soon
end.

6. Resolution: the character solves the main problem/conflict or someone solves it for him or
her.

7. Dnouement: (a French term, pronounced: day-noo-moh) the ending. At this point, any
remaining secrets, questions or mysteries which remain after the resolution are solved by the
characters or explained by the author. Sometimes the author leaves us to think about the
THEME or future possibilities for the characters.

You can think of the dnouement as the opposite of the exposition: instead of getting ready to
tell us the story by introducing the setting and characters, the author is getting ready to end it
with a final explanation of what actually happened and how the characters think or feel about
it. This can be the most difficult part of the plot to identify, as it is often very closely tied to the
resolution.
Gustav Freytag was a Nineteenth Century German novelist who saw common patterns in the plots
of stories and novels and developed a diagram to analyze them. He diagrammed a story's plot using
a pyramid like the one shown here:
 Characterization 1 Character Types

Antagonist: a.k.a. "the bad guy" but better thought of as the opponent of the protagonist or central
character. The action of a story arises from conflict between the antagonist and protagonist, as in
Baum's The Wizard of Oz with its struggle between the Wicked Witch of the West and Dorothy. The
antagonist need not be a person at all but may be an animal, an inanimate object or even nature
itself. For example, the antagonist of Tom Godwin's story "The Cold Equations" is outer space.

Cardboard character: A stereotype, mannequin, drone or otherwise uninteresting simulacrum

passing for a real character. Cardboard is what you use when for whatever reason you fail to
put yourself into your characters. It is the only pejorative I've included in this list. The utopia of
Edward Bellamy's didactic "idea" novel Looking Backward is entirely populated with right-thinking
men and women of cardboard.

Confidante: someone in whom the central character confides, thus revealing her personality. Once
again, that someone need not be a person. In Robert Heinlein's The Door Into Summer the central
character, Dan Davis, continually confides his plans and feelings to his cat, Pete.

Developing character: a character who changes over the course of the story. The central character is
often but not always a developing character. However, it's crucial that the action of the story causes
some character to change. When I was at Clarion, Damon Knight used to write "Who cares?" at the
end of stories in which no one develops a characteristically terse criticism which I found
devastating. A tour de force of developing characterization is Louis Sacchetti, the protagonist of
Thomas Disch's Camp Concentration, who is infected with a disease that makes him a genius.

Flat character: Someone who is characterized by one or two traits. "Flat" and "round" were terms
first proposed by E.M. Forster in his Aspects of the Novel and they are often misapplied by modern
critics. Flat is especially corrupted when used as a synonym for cardboard; in Forster's usage, flat is
not a derogatory term. Rather, it describes a character who can be summed up in a sentence.
Gollum from The Lord of the Rings is a wonderful character who is absolutely flat in that his
character is determined by his obsession with the recovery of the ring, "his precious." Every story
needs some flat characters and many successful stories, for instance Charles Dickens' Christmas
Carol, have nothing but flat characters.

Foil: someone whose character contrasts to that of the protagonist, thus throwing it into sharp
relief. In Connie Willis's "The Last of the Winnebagos," Katie Powell serves as a foil to the
protagonist David McCombe. Katie chases after David to expiate her guilt over killing one of the last
surviving dogs on Earth, while David runs away from Katie and from admitting to himself that he,
too, is responsible for the dog's death.

Narrator: the fictional storyteller. When the narrator is involved in the action of the story she's
called a first person narrator. The sentence "I watched the triceratops eat my purse," is narrated in
first person. When the narrator stands outside the story, she is usually taken to be the implied
author. "Persephone watched as the triceratops ate her purse," is narrated in third person,
presumably by the writer. Narrators can either be reliable or unreliable. For example, in Gulliver's
Travels, Gulliver narrates his own story: "I began last week to permit my wife to sit at dinner with
me, at the farthest end of a long table, and to answer (but with the utmost brevity) the few
questions I ask her." However, he is so credulous at the start and misanthropic at the end that we
know enough not to take everything he tells us seriously. Since he is unreliable we must read
between his lines to discover Jonathan Swift's intent. On the other hand, we have every reason to
trust the third person narration in "Nightfall"; the implied storyteller, Isaac Asimov, means exactly
what he says. The vast majority of author-as-narrator stories are told reliably. Indeed, a story in
which the implied writer appears to be unreliable is usually scorned as a "readercheater." However,
there have been interesting experiments in unreliable third person narration. The implied Bruce
Sterling in "Dori Bangs" makes clear that he is unreliable in pursuit of higher truth. This is all very
complicated, I know. We'll more talk about narrators when we get to viewpoint characters.

Protagonist: The central character, or the one whose name comes to mind when you ask the
question, "Whose story is this?" A story ought to have just one protagonist but a novel can have
several, as in Kate Wilhelm's multigenerational novel of the Sumner family, Where Late the Sweet
Birds Sang.

Round character: one who is complex and perhaps even contradictory. E. M. Forster (see Flat
Characters) put it succinctly, "The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a
convincing way." If a flat character can be summed up in a sentence or two, a round character
would probably take an essay. For example, Genly Ai in The Left Hand of Darkness is one of the of
Ursula Le Guin's many round characters.

Spear-carriers: minor characters who provide verisimilitude. They must necessarily be flat since they
are rarely named or described in any detail. They tend to run in crowds; in movies these are the
folks who made up the "cast of thousands." The dim-witted population of Earth in C. M. Kornbluth
"The Marching Morons" are spear-carriers.

Static character: a character who does not develop. Most characters in a story should be static, so
as not to distract from the significant changes you will be depicting in the central character. Static,
however, most certainly does not mean boring. In Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," all of the
characters except for the scapegoat, Tessie Hutchinson, are static.

Stock character: a.k.a. stereotype, but actually a special kind of flat character who is instantly
recognizable to most readers, as in the Brave Starship Captain or the Troubled Teen or the Ruthless
Businessperson. In the hands of a clumsy writer, the stock character never rises above the
cardboard stereotype, which is unfortunate. Even as cliches encapsulate a kernel of truth, so do
stock characters reflect aspects of real people. Courage is required of military personnel; people in
business act ruthlessly at times in order to survive in the Darwinian world of business. In his
collection of short stories, Fancies and Goodnights, John Collier demonstrates how to bring stock
characters to life he's particularly good with devils.

Sympathetic character: One whose motivations readers can understand and whose feelings they
can comfortably share. This is the kind of character of whom naive readers will say "I could identify
with her." The protagonist is often, but not always, sympathetic. Note that a sympathetic character
need not be a good person. In George Orwell's 1984, despite the fact that he betrays Julia and his
own values by embracing Big Brother, Winston Smith remains a sympathetic character.

Unsympathetic character: One whose motivations are suspect and whose feelings make us
uncomfortable. The boundary between sympathetic and unsympathetic characterization is
necessarily ill-defined. The protagonist of Lucius Shepard's "Black Coral," an Ugly American named
Prince, is definitely not sympathetic, nor is he intended to be. However once he brings destruction
down on himself, we feel sorry for him. The central irony of this story is that the punishment Prince
receives is to become a sympathetic character.

Viewpoint character: the focus of narration, the person or persons through whom we experience
the story. One kind of viewpoint character is the first person narrator. Here's Mitchell Courtenay,
the first person viewpoint character of Pohl and Kornbluth's The Space Merchants: "As I dressed
that morning I ran over in my mind the long list of statistics, evasions and exaggerations that they
would expect in my report." When author herself acts as narrator, she usually chooses to tell the
story in the third person, limiting herself to the perspective of one character. While she is in his
point of view, she has access to his thoughts and memories but not to those of any one else, as in
"The View From Venus" by Karen Joy Fowler:

"Linda knows, of course, that the gorgeous male waiting for her, holding the
elevator door with his left hand, cannot be moving into apartment 201."

A well-written third person viewpoint can be so seductive that it appears that the viewpoint
character is, in fact, the narrator; the implied author seems to disappear. However the invisible
author must continue to be reliable even if the viewpoint character is an unreliable focus on the
action of the story. John Kessel's Good News From Outer Space has several limited third person
viewpoint characters some fairly reliable, some less so. Kessel maintains consistency of point of
view by switching only at the chapter breaks. It's also possible to have no viewpoint character at all,
as when an omniscient author sees through everyone's eyes. In "Day Million," Frederick Pohl not
only tells us what all his characters think but also what his imaginary readers are thinking as they
read his story!

Character development

A well-developed character is one that has been thoroughly characterised, with many traits shown
in the narrative. The better the audience knows the character, the better the character
development. Thorough characterisation makes characters well-rounded and complex. This allows
for a sense of realism. As an example, according to F.R. Leavis, Leo Tolstoy was the creator of some
of the most complex and psychologically believable characters in fiction. In contrast, an
underdeveloped character is considered flat or stereotypical.

Character development is very important in character-driven literature, where stories focus not on
events, but on individual personalities. Classic examples include War and Peace or David
Copperfield. In a tragedy, the central character generally remains fixed with whatever character
flaw (hamartia) seals his fate; in a comedy the central characters typically undergo some kind of
epiphany (sudden realization) whereupon they adjust their erratic beliefs and practices, and avert a
tragic fate. Historically, stories and plays focusing on characters became common as part of the
19th century Romantic movement, and character-driven literature rapidly supplanted more plot-
driven literature that typically utilizes easily identifiable archetypes rather than proper character
development.

Direct vs. indirect characterisation

There are two ways an author can convey information about a character:

Direct or explicit characterisation:

The author literally tells the audience what a character is like. This may be done via the narrator,
another character or by the character him- or herself.
Indirect or implicit characterisation:
The audience must deduce for themselves what the character is like through the characters
thoughts, actions, speech (choice of words, way of talking), looks and interaction with other
characters, including other characters reactions to that particular person.

Characterisation in Drama

In performance an actor has less time to characterise and so can risk the character coming across as
underdeveloped. The great realists of dramaturgy have relied heavily on implicit characterisation
which occupy the main body of their character driven plays. Examples of these playwrights are
Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg and Anton Chekhov. Such psychological epics as The
Seagull indirectly characterise the protagonists so that the audience is drawn into their inner
turmoils as they are slowly revealed over the 3 hours of time spent with the characters. The actors
taking on these roles must also characterise over a long period of time, to the point that there
seems to be no direct statement of who the character is at any point, this realism in acting requires
the actor to characterise from their own persona as a starting point. The audience therefore does
not recognize a realistic characterisation immediately.

However the playwright and actor also have the choice of direct characterisation in a similar vein to
the writer in literature. The presentation of a character for a sociological discussion only has to be
as real as the discussion requires. In this way a character can be used as an iconic reference by a
playwright to suggest location, an epoch in history, or even draw in a political debate. The inclusion
of a stock character, or in literary terms an archetypal character, by a playwright can risk drawing
overly simplistic pictures of people and smack of stereotyping however the degree of success in
direct characterisation in order to swiftly get to the action varies from play to play and often
according to the use the character is put to. In explicitly characterising a certain character the actor
makes a similar gamble. The choice of what aspects of a character are demonstrated by the actor to
directly characterise is a political choice and makes a statement as to the ethics and agenda of the
actor and the play as a whole. Examples of direct characterisation are found in mime especially, and
in Epic theater, yet also in the work of Steven Berkoff, The Wooster Group, and Complicite.

Both implicit and explicit characterisation in drama can result in a problematic, politically unstable
character, even a stereotype. And conversely both direct and indirect characterisation can make
complex and unique characters depending on the choices made by those doing the characterising.

NARRATORS

Point of view: narrator and character types

An author creates a person to tell the story, and this person is the narrator.
The narrator delivers the point of view of the story.
Multiple narrators of the story can also present multiple points of view.
A first person narrator
uses the pronoun "I" to tell the story, and can be either a major or minor character.
It may be easier for a reader to relate to a story told in a first person account.
A subjective narrator is generally unreliable
because he/she is in the story,
and can only speak to his/her experience within it.
A second person narrator
uses the pronoun "you" and is not used very often since it makes the reader a participant in the
story (and you, as reader, may be reluctant to be in the action!).
A third person narrator
uses the pronoun "he" or "she" and does not take part in the story.
An objective narrator is an observer
and describes or interprets thoughts, feelings, motivations, of the characters. Details such as
setting, scenes, and what was said is stronger with an objective observer
An omniscient (omniscient = all knowing) narrator has access to all
the actions and thoughts within fiction
A limited narrator has a restricted view of events,
and doesn't "know" the whole story
Questions:
How much does the narrator know?
Does he or she know everything, including the thoughts, feelings, motivations, etc. or
present just limited information?
Do you (the reader) know more?
Time?
Do events take place "now" (verbs in the present tense)?
or in the past (verbs are in the past tense)?
Are past recollections fresh, or distant, and maybe hazy?
Is the narrator a participant in, or a witness to, the action?
Is the story second-hand, related "as told to" the narrator?
Think of yourself telling someone something that happened:
How much of the event do you know, and how does that affect the story?
Why is the story being told, and why now?
What is the motivation?

First Person

1. The Protagonist

Relatively straightforward, this is a story the hero narrates. Hell narrate the same way he talks, but
with more description and perhaps better grammar. The reader is privy to all his thoughts and
opinions, which means we get to know the hero faster, and often relate to him more easily.
Example:

I take up my pen in the year of grace 17, and go back to the time when my father kept the
Admiral Benbow inn, and the brown old seaman, with the saber cut, first took up his lodging under
our roof.
Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson

2. The Secondary Character

Someone close to the protagonist, but not the main hero. The same things in the above type apply
to this type, but the focus of the story moves away from the narrator.
Example:

Dr. Watson, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, said Stamford, introducing us.

How are you? he said cordially, gripping my hand with a strength for which I should hardly have
given him credit. You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.
How on earth did you know that? I asked in astonishment.
Never mind, said he, chuckling to himself.
Watson in A Study in Scarlet, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Third Person

Third person omniscient

This type knows all, peeking into the lives of major and minor characters, reading everyones
thoughts. This enables the writer to explore multiple facets of the story in depth. Cornelia
Funkes Inkheart trilogy, for example.

Third person limited

This type knows only what the main character, or characters, know. This is more restrictive, but
increases suspense and intrigue, because the reader only solves the mystery at the same time the
characters do. 1984, by George Orwell, is a good example.

The following types can fall into either omniscient or limited:

3. The Detached Observer

A detached third person narrator sticks to telling the story, and never inserts his own opinions
never slips in an I or a me except in direct dialogue. You probably wont notice voice at all. Its
fruitless to give an excerpt showing what a writer didnt do, but Orwells 1984 is, again, a good
example.

4. The Commentator

This type never physically enters the story, but freely adds in his own amusing commentary. Allows
voice without the complication of using an existing character.
Example:

The curtains of his bed were drawn aside; and Scrooge, starting up into a half-recumbent attitude,
found himself face-to-face with the unearthly visitor who drew them: as close to it as I am now to
you, and I am standing in the spirit at your elbow.
A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens

Somewhere in Between

Or maybe the narrator isnt a strict third person, but is involved in the story in some way.

5. The Interviewer

This type has collected the details of the story after it happened, such as by interviewing the
characters. This lends a sense of reality to the story.
Example:

It brought both a smell and a sound, a musical sound. Edmund and Eustace would never talk about it
afterwards. Lucy could only say, It would break your heart. Why, said I, was it so sad? Sad!
No, said Lucy.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, by C.S. Lewis

6. The Secret Character

Sometimes a narrator only pretends to removed from the storythey may refer to themselves in
third person right up to the end, but will eventually be mentioned by some other character, or
revealed to be a major character, even the villain, for an extra-pleasing plot twist.
Example:

Lemony? Violet repeated. They would have named me Lemony? Where did they get that idea?
From someone who died, presumably, Klaus said.
The End, by Lemony Snicket

7. The Unreliable Narrator

Usually first person, but occasionally third, an unreliable narrator has a flawed point of view. That is,
the writer intentionally made him biased, misinformed, insane, etc. Examples include Nelly
inWuthering Heights, by Emily Bront, or Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger.
Heres one from Poe.

Example:

If still you think me mad, you will think no longer when I describe the wise precautions I took for the
concealment of the body. The night waned, and I worked hastily, but in silence. First of all I
dismembered the corpse.

The Tell-Tale Heart, by Edgar Allen Poe