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All
books and short stories are stories told by a narrator of some kind. With a thirdperson narrator, one who is not a part of the story, most of the time the narrator just tells
the story. Third-person narrators can be limited to one character’s point of view, or at most
a small group; or they can be omniscient, knowing what every character is doing, thinking,
and feeling. Omniscient narrators can also sometimes be intrusive; they give opinions
about the action or the characters they are describing.
In The Secret Garden, when Frances Hodgson Burnett first introduces Mary, the narrator
says, “When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody
said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true, too.” How does
this affect the reader’s opinion of Mary? Later on, the narrator, still describing Mary, says
“by the time she was six years old she was as tyrannical and selfish a little pig as ever
lived.” Now what is the reader supposed to think? By having the narrator give these
opinions, Burnett is able to shape the reader’s opinion of this character very quickly. Then,
when Mary changes, the reader can see how she grows.
In the first chapter of Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen’s narrator describes Mrs. Bennet
by saying, “She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain
temper.” The reader is able to make an immediate judgment about her based on this,
without Austen having to show Mrs. Bennet demonstrating these qualities.
Authors often use an intrusive narrator in short stories to quickly establish characters so
they can move on with the plot. Guy de Maupassant uses this kind of narration in The
Necklace when the narrator describes Mathilde Loisel by saying,
Mathilde suffered ceaselessly, feeling herself born to enjoy all delicacies
and all luxuries. She was distressed at the poverty of her dwelling, at the
bareness of the walls, at the shabby chairs, the ugliness of the curtains. All
those things, of which another woman of her rank would never even have
been conscious, tortured her and made her angry. The sight of the little
Breton peasant who did her humble housework aroused in her despairing
regrets and bewildering dreams.
It is immediately clear to the reader that Mathilde is unhappy with her circumstances and
feels very sorry for herself. The facts that she has a servant who does the housework and
that other women in her situation would feel differently tell the reader that Mme. Loisel
is selfish and unreasonable in her views. Having established this at the beginning, de
Maupassant can now go on with the action of the story
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Student Name________________________________________________________
Read the following passages and answer the questions that follow.
1. For no very intelligible reason, Mr. Lucas had hurried ahead of his party. He was perhaps reaching the age at which independence becomes valuable, because it is so
soon to be lost. Tired of attention and consideration, he liked breaking away from the
younger members, to ride by himself, and to dismount unassisted. Perhaps he also
relished that more subtle pleasure of being kept waiting for lunch, and of telling the
others on their arrival that it was of no consequence.
(E.M. Forster, The Road from Colonus)
a. How would you describe Mr. Lucas? Is he old or young? What kind of person is
he?
b. What clues does the narrator give to the age and temperament of Mr. Lucas?
c. Is the narrator sympathetic toward Mr. Lucas? How do you know?
2. As Mary begins her journey to England in The Secret Garden, the narrator tells the
reader this:
Other children seemed to belong to their fathers and mothers, but she had never
seemed to really be anyone’s little girl. She had had servants, and food and clothes,
but no one had taken any notice of her. She did not know that this was because she
was a disagreeable child; but then, of course, she did not know she was disagreeable.
She often thought that other people were, but she did not know that she was so herself.
(Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden)
a. What does this passage reveal about Mary?
b. How does it change the reader’s opinion of Mary from what we saw in the earlier
passage (first page, second paragraph)?
c. Using information from both passages, what is the narrator’s attitude toward
Mary?
Continued
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3. The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert
in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances. Fifty degrees
below zero meant eighty odd degrees of frost. Such fact impressed him as being cold
and uncomfortable, and that was all. It did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as
a creature of temperature, and upon man’s frailty in general, able only to live within
certain narrow limits of heat and cold; and from there on it did not lead him to the
conjectural field of immortality and man’s place in the universe. Fifty degrees below
zero stood for a bite of frost that hurt and that must be guarded against by the use of
mittens, ear-flaps, warm moccasins, and thick socks. Fifty degrees below zero was
to him just precisely fifty degrees below zero. That there should be anything more to it
than that was a thought that never entered his head.
(Jack London, To Build a Fire)
a. What does the man being described think about the cold?
b. Does the narrator think the man is right to think of the cold the way he does?
c. What is the narrator’s opinion of the cold?
d. What do you think of the man? Do you think this is what the narrator, and the author, intend?
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Inc.