The very first word of any story is often the first word of its narration, yet the mechanism that delivers it remains invisible to the reader until they stop to think about it. 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. While written stories like novels and memoirs require this commentary to exist 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 narrator may be a character participating in the events, the author stepping into the frame, or an anonymous force that simply relates the story without ever being involved in the plot itself. This fundamental element determines not only who tells the story but how the story is told, encompassing everything from the grammatical person used to the scope of information presented to the audience.
The Five Planes Of View
The Russian semiotician Boris Uspenskij identified five distinct planes on which point of view is expressed in a narrative, creating a complex framework for understanding how a story is perceived. These planes include spatial, temporal, psychological, phraseological, and ideological dimensions, each offering a different lens through which the audience views the text. The psychological point of view focuses on the behaviors of characters, encompassing the broad question of the narrator's distance or affinity to each character and event represented in the text. The ideological point of view is considered the most basic aspect of point of view yet the least accessible to formalization, as its analysis relies to a degree on intuitive understanding of the norms, values, beliefs, and worldview of the narrator or a character. This ideological layer may be stated outright as explicit ideology or embedded at deep-structural levels of the text where it is not easily identified. 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.
The Pronouns Of Power
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. This mode creates a sense of intimacy that is absent in third-person narratives, which refer to all characters with pronouns like he or she and never use first- or second-person pronouns. The second-person point of view is a point of view similar to first-person in its possibilities of unreliability, where the narrator recounts their own experience but adds distance through the use of the second-person pronoun you. This is not a direct address to any given reader even if it purports to be, such as in the metafictional work If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino. Other notable examples of second-person 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.
Omniscient point of view is presented by a narrator with an overarching perspective, seeing and knowing everything that happens within the world of the story, including what each of the characters is thinking and feeling. The inclusion of an omniscient narrator is typical in nineteenth-century fiction, including works by Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy and George Eliot. Some works of fiction, especially novels, employ multiple points of view, with different points of view presented in discrete sections or chapters, including The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud and the Song of Ice and Fire series by George R. R. Martin. The Harry Potter series focuses on the protagonist for much of the seven novels, but sometimes deviates to other characters, particularly in the opening chapters of later novels in the series, which switch from the view of the eponymous Harry to other characters. For example, at the beginning of chapter one of Half-Blood Prince, an omniscient narrator describes the Muggle Prime Minister as sitting alone in his office, reading a long memo that was slipping through his brain without leaving the slightest trace of meaning behind. Examples of Limited or close third-person point of view, confined to one character's perspective, include J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace.
The Future And The Past
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. This could be in the narrator's distant past or their immediate past, which for practical purposes is the same as their present. Past tense can be used regardless of whether the setting is in the reader's past, present, or future. In narratives using present tense, the events of the plot are depicted as occurring in the narrator's current moment of time. A recent example of novels narrated in the present tense are those of the Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins. Present tense can also be used to narrate events in the reader's past, known as historical present. This tense is more common in spontaneous conversational narratives than in written literature, though it is sometimes used in literature to give a sense of immediacy of the actions. Screenplay action is also written in the present tense. 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, so many future-tense stories have a prophetic tone.
The Stream Of Thought
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. 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, and the character Offred's often fragmented thoughts in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Irish writer James Joyce exemplifies this style in his novel Ulysses. 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 or a level of suspicion or mystery as to what information is meant to be true and what is meant to be false. Unreliable narrators are usually first-person narrators, though a third-person narrator may also be unreliable. An example is J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, in which the novel's narrator Holden Caulfield is biased, emotional and juvenile, divulging or withholding certain information deliberately and at times probably quite unreliable.
The Oral Tradition
In Indigenous American communities, narratives and storytelling are often told by a number of elders in the community, ensuring that the stories are never static because they are shaped by the relationship between narrator and audience. Thus, each individual story may have countless variations, with narrators often incorporating minor changes in the story in order to tailor the story to different audiences. The use of multiple narratives in a story is not simply a stylistic choice, but rather an interpretive one that offers insight into the development of a larger social identity and the impact that has on the overarching narrative, as explained by Lee Haring. Haring provides an example from the Arabic folktales of One Thousand and One Nights to illustrate how framing was used to loosely connect each story to the next, where each story was enclosed within the larger narrative. Additionally, Haring draws comparisons between Thousand and One Nights and the oral storytelling observed in parts of rural Ireland, islands of the Southwest Indian Ocean and African cultures such as Madagascar. The moment recalls the Thousand and One Nights, where the story of The Envier and the Envied is enclosed in the larger story told by the Second Kalandar, and many stories are enclosed in others.