Short answers, pulled from the story.
Narration is the act of a specific person or an unspecified literary voice conveying a story to an audience, serving as the essential bridge between the plot and the listener. This mechanism delivers the story to the reader or listener and exists in written stories like novels and memoirs in their entirety. Narration is merely an option in films, plays, and video games where dialogue or visual action can carry the weight of the tale.
The Russian semiotician Boris Uspenskij identified five distinct planes on which point of view is expressed in a narrative. These planes include spatial, temporal, psychological, phraseological, and ideological dimensions, each offering a different lens through which the audience views the text. The American literary critic Susan Sniader Lanser further developed these categories, arguing that the psychological point of view is an extremely complex aspect that determines the narrator's relationship to the story.
A first-person point of view reveals the story through an openly self-referential and participating narrator who uses pronouns like I and me to create a close relationship between the narrator and reader. Third-person narratives refer to all characters with pronouns like he or she and never use first- or second-person pronouns. This mode creates a sense of intimacy that is absent in third-person narratives, which may be limited to one character's perspective as seen in J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace.
Notable examples of second-person point of view include the novel Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney, the short fiction of Lorrie Moore and Junot Díaz, the short story The Egg by Andy Weir and Second Thoughts by Michel Butor. Sections of N. K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season and its sequels are also narrated in the second person, demonstrating the versatility of this rare narrative mode. The metafictional work If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino also utilizes this perspective.
In narrative past tense, the events of the plot occur before the narrator's present, which is by far the most common tense in which stories are expressed. In narratives using present tense, the events of the plot are depicted as occurring in the narrator's current moment of time, as seen in the Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins. The future tense is the most rare, portraying the events of the plot as occurring some time after the narrator's present, often described such that the narrator has foreknowledge of their future.
Stream of consciousness gives the typically first-person narrator's perspective by attempting to replicate the thought processes of the narrative character, as opposed to simply the actions and spoken words. Examples include the multiple narrators' feelings in William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, and the character Offred's often fragmented thoughts in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Unreliable narration involves the use of an untrustworthy narrator, a mode that may be employed to give the audience a deliberate sense of disbelief in the story, as seen in J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye.