Narration

• 1. Introduction

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  Narration is the mechanism that holds every story together. Without it, novels, short stories, poems, and memoirs would simply not exist. Films, plays, television shows, and video games can get by without narration by leaning on dialogue and visual action, but written stories have no such option. The narrator is always there, whether named or anonymous, shaping what you know and when you know it.

  Who is that narrator, exactly? Sometimes a character living inside the story, sometimes an invisible voice hovering above it, sometimes the author stepping forward in person. And the choices a storyteller makes about that narrator, about tense, perspective, and technique, ripple through every sentence of the work. What does it mean to tell a story from inside it rather than above it? What happens when the narrator cannot be trusted? Those are the questions this documentary will explore.

• 2. Point of View

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  The Russian semiotician Boris Uspenskij identified five distinct planes on which point of view operates in a narrative: spatial, temporal, psychological, phraseological, and ideological. The American literary critic Susan Sniader Lanser later extended and developed those categories further.

  The psychological plane focuses on characters' behaviors, and Lanser described it as an extremely complex aspect of point of view, one that encompasses the narrator's distance or affinity to each character and event represented in the text. The ideological plane reaches even deeper. Lanser called it the most basic aspect of point of view and simultaneously the least accessible to formalization, because analyzing it depends in part on intuitive understanding. This ideological dimension covers the norms, values, beliefs, and worldview of the narrator or character, and it can be stated openly in what Lanser calls explicit ideology, or buried at deep-structural levels of the text where it resists easy identification.

  The theorist Gerard Genette drew a well-known line between first-person narration, which he called intradiegetic, and third-person narration, which he called extradiegetic. These terms capture whether the narrator exists inside the story's world or stands outside it.

• 3. Speaking in First and Second Person

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  First-person narration creates a close relationship between narrator and reader by using pronouns like I and me, and we and us when the narrator is part of a larger group. The narrator is openly self-referential, participating in the story rather than observing from a distance.

  Second-person narration introduces an odd kind of distance. The narrator recounts experience but filters it through the pronoun you, which is often ironic rather than genuinely inclusive. Italo Calvino's novel If on a winter's night a traveler is a well-known example, using second person in a deliberately metafictional way. Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, the short fiction of Lorrie Moore and Junot Diaz, Andy Weir's short story The Egg, and Michel Butor's Second Thoughts all use second person as a formal device. N. K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season and its sequels also narrate sections in the second person.

  Bright Lights, Big City opens with the line: "You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy."

  Not every work that uses the word you qualifies as true second-person narration. Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist and gamebooks such as the American Choose Your Own Adventure series and the British Fighting Fantasy series are not true second-person narratives, because in each case an implicit narrator or writer addresses an audience. Text-based interactive fiction, including Colossal Cave Adventure and Zork, follows the same convention. Spiderweb Software's graphical games also use pop-up text boxes that address the player directly. Charles Stross's novel Halting State is mostly written in second person as a deliberate allusion to that interactive fiction tradition.

• 4. Third Person and Its Variations

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  Third-person narration uses pronouns like he and she throughout, never shifting to first or second person. Within that broad category, the most consequential split is between omniscient and limited perspectives.

  Omniscient narration gives the narrator an overarching view: access to every character's thoughts and feelings, and knowledge of every event happening anywhere in the story's world. This mode was especially common in nineteenth-century fiction, appearing in works by Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, and George Eliot. Some novels extend this by deploying multiple distinct points of view across separate chapters or sections. Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children, and George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series all do this. Rabindranath Tagore's The Home and the World, written in 1916, moves among three different point-of-view characters. Rick Riordan's The Heroes of Olympus alternates perspectives at regular intervals.

  The Harry Potter series mostly follows its protagonist across seven novels, but the opening chapters of later books sometimes shift to other characters. In the first chapter 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.

  Limited or close third-person narration stays anchored to one character's perspective throughout. J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace is a noted example of this mode. A related contrast separates subjective narration, which conveys characters' inner thoughts and feelings, from objective narration, which refuses to enter any character's mind and presents events without describing opinions, emotions, or private thoughts.

• 5. Multiple Narrators and Living Traditions

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  Some works multiply narrators rather than settling on one. D. J. MacHale's Pendragon adventure series, spanning ten books, alternates between first-person journal entries from the main character and a disembodied third-person perspective focused on his friends back home.

  In Indigenous American communities, narration is not primarily a literary device but a living social practice. Stories are typically told by a number of elders in the community, which means narratives are never static. Because the relationship between narrator and audience shapes each telling, a single story may exist in countless variations. Narrators often make small adjustments to tailor a story to a particular audience.

  The scholar Lee Haring explained that using multiple narratives is not merely a stylistic choice but an interpretive one. Multiple narrators can illuminate the development of a broader social identity and its influence on the overarching narrative. Haring drew comparisons between the framing device of the Arabic folktale collection One Thousand and One Nights, where individual stories are enclosed within larger stories, and oral storytelling practices in rural Ireland, the islands of the Southwest Indian Ocean, and African cultures including Madagascar. A 1935 Irish storyteller captured the dynamic plainly: "I'll fix your sword for you tomorrow, if you tell me a story while I'm doing it."

• 6. Tense and the Shape of Time

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  Narrative past tense is by far the most common tense in which stories are told. In past tense, the events of the plot have already happened by the time the narrator speaks. This can mean events in the narrator's distant past or their immediate past, which for practical purposes functions the same as the present. Crucially, past tense can be used regardless of whether the story is set in the reader's past, present, or future.

  Present-tense narration treats events as happening in the narrator's current moment. Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games trilogy is a recent prominent example. Present tense can also be turned backward to narrate events from the reader's past, a technique known as historical present. Screenplays are written in present tense as a convention of the format. In everyday speech, present tense appears frequently in spontaneous conversational storytelling, even when recounting past events, because it creates a sense of immediacy.

  Future tense is the rarest of the three. It portrays events as happening after the narrator's present, and because the narrator must have foreknowledge of what has not yet occurred, many future-tense stories carry a prophetic tone.

• 7. Stream of Consciousness and Unreliable Voices

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  Stream of consciousness is a technique that attempts to replicate the actual thought processes of a character rather than simply reporting their actions or words. Interior monologue, incomplete thoughts, and private desires are all rendered on the page, accessible to the reader but not necessarily communicated to other characters in the story. William Faulkner used multiple narrators to express inner feeling in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. Margaret Atwood's narrator Offred in The Handmaid's Tale often thinks in fragmented, discontinuous passages. James Joyce made stream of consciousness central to his novel Ulysses.

  Unreliable narration takes a different approach to distorting the reader's access to the truth. An unreliable narrator is one who cannot be fully trusted, and the effect is to introduce suspicion about which parts of the story are accurate and which are not. The technique is most often used with first-person narrators, though third-person narrators can also be unreliable. J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye gives the clearest example of the type: its narrator Holden Caulfield is described in the novel itself as biased, emotional, and juvenile, someone who deliberately divulges or withholds information and who is at times probably quite unreliable. The question of what Holden actually knows versus what he chooses to tell is woven into every page.