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NARRATION
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Hello, welcome to ENC 1102. I’m Dr. Michael Baker, and today we will be talking about narration.
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The first thing we will talk about today will be point of view. We will then discuss several different styles
in which a story might be told.
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There are technically, three main categories for point of view, but really only two of them are important:
first-person and third-person. So let’s talk about them first.
You can tell when a story is told from the first person point of view when the author uses the pronoun
“I.” Other words that might clue you in include the pronouns me, my, and mine. You might remember
that Raymond Carver’s short story “Cathedral” is written from the first-person perspective. The final
sentences of the story are:
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“My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything. ‘It’s
really something,’ I said” (46).
Notice all the first-person pronouns. There are about five “I’s” and a couple “my’s.”
First-person POV (that is, “point of view”) has both advantages and disadvantages. On the positive side,
telling a story in the first-person makes it feel like the main character is talking directly to the reader. It
almost feels like you are part of a conversation, and as readers we get to know the main character very
well. This sense of closeness makes it easy for readers to connect with the main character. This is
probably why so many novels today are written using first-person narratives – think about The Hunger
Games by Suzanne Collins, or Divergent by Veronica Roth, or the recent Stephen King novel, Revival.
But there are limitations that come with a first-person narrator. The reader can only be told what the
character knows. In a typical Tom Clancy novel, we see what Jack Ryan is doing in one scene – but then,
in the next scene, we might get a glimpse of what his current antagonist is doing. The ability to switch
the focus from one character to another allows the reader to get the bigger picture. But a first-person
narrator can’t tell you what he or she doesn’t know – and if Clancy’s novels were narrated by Jack Ryan,
we would never know for sure what the antagonist was doing. The story could still work, but it would be
a very different reading experience.
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Now, I will note that on very rare occasions, you might encounter a story told from a first-person plural
point of view – those stories are told with the pronouns “we” and “our.” These stories are rare, but one
famous example is William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily.”
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Although many stories are told in first person, historically speaking third-person is probably the most
common point of view. You can tell when an author is using third person because of all the he, she, it,
and they pronouns. John Steinbeck’s “The Chrysanthemums,” for instance, is told in the third-person. If
we look at the first parts of paragraph 4 and 5 of that story, we can see that the story is not told by the
protagonist; it is told about her:
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“Elisa Allen, working in her flower garden, looked down across the yard and saw Henry, her husband,
talking to two men in business suits… Elisa watch them for a moment and then went back to her work.”
If Steinbeck had written this story in the first-person, it would have sounded something like this: “I was
working in my flower garden when I looked across the yard and saw Henry, my husband, talking to two
men in business suits… I watched them for a moment and then went back to work.”
But Steinbeck didn’t write the story like that; he chose to keep the reader at a slight distance from Elisa.
One reason he probably did this is that it enabled him to start the story a little before introducing the
protagonist. The first three paragraphs set the scene for us, and the details provided help us interpret
the story. After all, the description of the fog sitting on the mountains like “a closed pot” helps us realize
– on a second reading, at least – that Elisa is in some ways trapped in her current situation. The third
person also allows there to be a little more ambiguity at the end of the story, because we are simply told
that Elisa “was crying weakly – like an old woman” (448). If Elisa was telling this story herself, we would
expect a more precise explanation of why she is crying; as it is, the narrator chooses not to tell us, and
we are forced to come to our own conclusions.
But if you notice, even though “The Chrysanthemums” is told in the third-person, Steinbeck’s “camera”
(so to speak) always follows Elisa. We get little bits of information about Elisa’s thoughts and feelings
that we don’t get about other characters. That’s because the third person point of view has two
categories: limited and omniscient. “The Chrysanthemums” is limited to Elisa’s own point of view.
Except for the description at the very beginning, everything we are told in the story is how Elisa would
have seen and heard and experienced it. We don’t know that the tinker has thrown the flowers away
until Elisa sees them on the side of the road.
This limited type of third-person POV is very different from the omniscient type. Omniscient means “allknowing,” and many stories used to be told from by an omniscient narrator. Compare the limited
amount of information Steinbeck gives us in “The Chrysanthemums” with the wealth of information
Hawthorne gives us about the characters in “The Birth-Mark.” In the brief exchange when Georgiana
asks Aylmer if he remembers having a dream the night before, he replies:
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“None! none whatever!” replied Aylmer, starting; but then he added, in a dry, cold tone, affected for the
sake of concealing the real depth of his emotion… “And you did dream of it?” continued Georgiana
hastily; for she dreaded lest a gust of tears should interrupt what she had to say.
Notice here how we are allowed glimpses into what both Aylmer and Georgiana are thinking. We learn
that Aylmer is trying to conceal how he really feels, and that Georgiana is afraid that she is about to
break into tears. In “The Chrysanthemums,” the only character whose true emotions were are ever told
about are Elisa’s – because the author is limiting our knowledge to what she feels and knows.
Hawthorne, however, is letting us know the thoughts and feelings of both characters. In this sense, we
as readers become “all knowing.”
Obviously, one major advantage of this POV is that as readers we get to have the whole picture. We can
know what’s going on at all times, and in even other places if the author chooses to provide that
information. One disadvantage is that it can be more difficult for the reader to create a connection with
any single character; another disadvantage is that if the author wants to hide something, the reader
might feel “cheated” when the secret is revealed. After all, why tell us everything except that key piece
of information?
So, be aware of the differences between third-person limited and third-person omniscient points of
view.
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Earlier I said that second-person point of view is not really important. That is because few stories are
written from the second person POV. Writers want readers to connect in some way with their main
characters, but if the main character is “you”… well, who knows you better than you do? Certainly not
some writer you’ve never met. Besides, everybody is different. So, if I try to write a story in which “you”
are doing things… well, I might write, “When you arrive home, you notice all the lights in your house are
out. You remember leaving them on. You glance over to the neighbor’s house and see lights on, so
nothing knocked out the power. You shrug and decide that you must be remembering things wrong. You
get out of the car, and unlock your door.”
Now, some of you are probably thinking, “What? That’s stupid! There might be a burglar in the house. I
wouldn’t go in there! I would call the police.” Others might be thinking, “Well, I’d walk around outside
first, to see if there were any open doors or broken windows.” Still others might think, “I’d call the
neighbor and ask someone to go in with me.” A few might be thinking, “Yeah, I’d go on inside. It’s no big
deal.” The problem is, only the last group of readers will be satisfied with the actions of the main
character (who is, after all, “you”).
Because of the ample opportunities to lose readers, few stories are written in the second-person. In
fact, the only ones that come to mind immediately are the old “Choose Your Own Adventure” series of
kids’ books.
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Now, there are a few types of narrative styles you should be aware of. For third-person stories today,
the most common style is the objective style. When an author writes in the objective style, he or she
tries to describe things as they are – and let the reader make decisions about whether it is good or bad,
nice or mean, or whatever. Think of the old phrase, “Just the facts.” In “The Chrysanthemums,” does
Steinbeck ever really tell us whether or not Henry is a good husband? No, he simply describes some of
the things Henry says and does, and readers must then decide whether or not Henry is nice and shy, or
uncaring and insensitive. For the most part, Steinbeck writes objectively.
An intrusive narrator will sometimes break the wall of fiction and directly addresses the reader. There’s
a little bit of this at the end of Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” when the narrator suddenly asks,
“Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest, and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting?
Be it so if you will…” Sometimes, an intrusive narrator might even inform us how we should interpret
something in the story, by telling us something like So-and-so is an honest man and can always be
trusted to do what’s right. This style of writing went out of fashion some time ago, so we don’t
encounter it very often today.
A type of narration that we do encounter with some frequency today is the so-called unreliable narrator.
You should definitely be on the lookout for an unreliable narrator when you read a first-person story.
Sometimes, an author will set up subtle clues that suggest that the narrator isn’t necessarily telling us
the full truth. Or, perhaps the narrator isn’t lying, but doesn’t have the correct information. After all,
think about how people really are when they are telling stories. A lot of people will embellish things to
make themselves look better. Plus, we all have our own biases. Can you be completely objective about
your mother? Or about your best friend? Your worst enemy?
Susan Farrell, for example, suggests that we re-evaluate Dee in Walker’s “Everyday Use.” After all,
everything we learn about Dee comes from Mama – Mama thinks that Dee was happy to see the old
house burn down, and believes that Dee will hate the new house just as much. But when Dee arrives,
she seems to get the house in the background of every picture she takes. Does Mama have the wrong
impression about Dee? If so, then the readers do, too. It is definitely worth thinking about whenever you
have a first-person narrator – can you trust all of the information that you are getting? Does the author
provide any clues to suggest that there is more to the story?
Finally, another narrative technique we should talk about is stream of consciousness. This type of
narration can be rather confusing, because it mimics the human mind and the way we think. Have you
ever noticed how your mind can bounce from one idea to another as you make these strange
connections, and then come back to your original thought? Stream of consciousness imitates that in
storytelling. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway…
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Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men
were coming. And then, thought, Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning—fresh as if issued to children on a
beach.
What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges,
which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the
open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning;
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…like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then
was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to
happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising,
falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, “Musing among the vegetables?”—was that it? —”I
prefer men to cauliflowers”— was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had
gone out on the terrace — Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July,
she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered…
Notice how the story seems to jump around so much? We go from flowers to the squeaky hinges of the
doors to a memory of Peter Walsh, and so on. It makes for difficult reading, but it resembles the way a
lot of people think.
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As a quick review, we today we talked about the main points of view used by most writers, particularly:
first-person, third-person limited, and third-person omniscient. We then discussed a few narrative
styles, such as the objective narrator and the unreliable narrator. And, of course, we briefly experienced
the stream of consciousness approach.
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The main source for this lecture was our Norton textbook.