WHO is narrating?

NARRATIVE POINT OF VIEW

(BASED ON FRIEDMAN’S TYOPOLOGY, WITH SOME CATEGORIES ADDED)

1. Editorial omniscience (intrusive omniscient narrator)

• characteristic of 18th – 19th Century fiction

• Tendency towards SUMMARY (sometimes SCENE)

• Main characteristic: DISTANCE (because he is EXTERNAL to the story)

• INTRUSION – Narrator’s words, thoughts, perceptions predominate: comments on life, customs, characters.

• “Divine” point of view (presides over the text like a god) – is OUTSIDE the narration (story):

(editorial omniscience cont’d)

• “...um eu que tudo segue, tudo sabe e tudo comenta, analisa e critica, sem nenhuma neutralidade. — De que lugar? — provavelmente de cima, dominando tudo e todos, até mesmo puxando com pleno domínio as nossas reações de leitores e driblando-nos o tempo todo.” (O foco narrativo, p. 29)

(editorial omniscience cont’d)

• Text frequently presents narrator’s DIGRESSIONS.

• More typical of Realist fiction, which proposed to “portray reality in minute detail”, represent “local color”, reproduce dialects etc.

2. Neutral omniscience (19th – 20th century)

• 3rd person narration

• Also tends towards SUMMARIZING, with more frequent use of SCENES for dialogue and action

• Characterization is often explained through narrator’s voice: a good 20th century example is the U.S. noir detective story of the 1930s (Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammet, for ex.)

3. “I” as witness (observer)

• Goes one step forward in terms of neutrality: presents less mediation between an outside voice and the reader.

• 1st person narration, internal to the narrative: experiences the events narrated, usually as a secondary character.

• In this sense, the point of view is limited, since the narrator does not share all the characters’ thoughts – and can only imagine what goes on in their minds, or make conjectures about certain events.

“I” as witness cont’d

• Presents a synthesis of the action, presents the scenes (but only as seen by the “eyewitness” narrator)

• This type of structure frequently presents documents, letters, to lend more verisimilitude to the story.

• Device used in the roman a clef : the narrator frequently uses dashes (---) in place of names. Discuss.

=> Discuss some examples of the “I” (eye) as witness from short fiction and novels.

4. “I” as protagonist

• The entire story is narrated through the perspective of the protagonist

• A famous Brazilian example: Diadorim, in Grande sertão, veredas.

• A famous U.S. example: Holden Caulfield, in The Cather in the Rye

• The reader makes discoveries along with the protagonist, since there is no external narrator.

\ 5. Multiple Selective Omniscience

• Apparent absence of narrator. • In spite of employing the 3rd person, the narrator

seems to be the character, and not someone external to what is being narrated.

• There is an outside/inside quality to the narration, making it difficult to distinguish whether the thoughts come from the narrator’s or the character/s.

• We may consider this a VOICE that blends the points of view of a close omniscient third person narrator and the character's first person speech.

• The story is presented more directly from the characters’ minds; from the facts and impressions left on them.

• Such fools we all are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can't be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June. (Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway)

Multiple selective cont’d

• Absolute predominance of the SCENE.

• Differs from neutral omniscience, in that the author now translates and analyses the characters’ thoughts, perceptions and feelings, filtered through the characters’ minds (and not after the fact, as in the case of the omniscient narrator).

• There is a PRESENTNESS in the narration, usually through FREE INDIRECT DISCOURSE (not a category by Friedman)

• Frequently actual sentences or phrases used by a character are reported.

6. Stream of consciousness (also not from Friedman)

. Deeply rooted in psychoanalytic theory and the

investigation of consciousness of the early 20th century.

• Is very easy to confuse with FID.

• The limits between INTERIOR MONOLOGUE and STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS are also difficult to establish.

• Because this technique is the direct representation of the character’s thought processes, the syntax may appear fragmented or ideas run one into the other.

Stream of consciousness cont’d

I am I and you are you and I know it and you dont know it and you could do so much for me if you just would and if you just would then I could tell you and then nobody would have to know it except you and me and Darl. (William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying)

• Notice how, in the above passage by V. Woolf, there are MARKERS that remind us that there is a narrator “behind the scene”.

7. The Dramatic Mode

• Now that both author and narrator have been eliminated, the characters’ mental state is absent from the narrative.

• The text is limited to information about the characters’ words and actions – similar to the theatre, with brief ‘stage directions’ tying the dialogues together.

• The angle is FRONTAL and FIXED, with the effect that there is a short distance between story and reader.

• Hemingway is considered a master of this narrative strategy.

8. The camera

• This last category proposed by Friedman is informed by the cinematic arts, and is the most extreme in terms of making the author appear to be completely absent.

• Is used for representing ‘snapshots’ of reality, as though caught by a camera.

• We should remind ourselves, however, that the camera is always held by someone, and, therefore, there is always a SELECTION, involving more or less focus on a certain character, or more emphasis on a certain scene – not to mention editing…

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So, to conclude...

…we should keep in mind that, “behind the scenes” there is a guiding intelligence, implicit in the narrative, which molds the material so as to direct the reader’s expectations. As Friedman himself acknowledges, “the act of writing (is) a process of alteration, selection, omission, and organization” (FRIEDMAN, Norman. Point of View in Fiction, p. 131

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