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| 21 Oct 2003 16:17 |
| In Defense of Third-Person Omniscient |
| Public |
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I posted an early version of this to a list ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) coffeeandink and I belong to. She asked me to expand it, so here it is.
Modern third-person limited says "You are this character, and you will go where she goes, see what she sees, feel her emotions. Pay no attention to the storyteller behind the curtain." Third-limited ties the reader tightly to the character.
Third-person omniscient says "I am the storyteller, and you are the listener, and together we will find out what happens." Third-omniscient ties the reader tightly to the storyteller and, if the storyteller is good, to the characters as well. The storyteller's passion for the characters and situation can increase the listener's passion for them.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
In a hole in the ground lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.
Tell me that either of those would be better without the description. That's not Elizabeth Bennett's point of view. That's not Bilbo Baggins's point of view. That's called narration. Some books have a transparent narrator. Some books have a narrator who participates in the action. (We call that first person.) Some have a narrator who comments, but does not participate. There is a spectrum, and there are valid writing choices to be made all along the spectrum. And this is just as true of pleasure fiction as it is of literary fiction. Exposition is a sin when it is boring and when it slows the narrative down unintentionally. Exposition is bad when the reader skips right past it. There are certainly things in the 19th-century novel that are dead as a doornail—long lyrical descriptions of scenery, for instance. We don't need those. We have photographs. But I think there is still very much a place for the present narrator. Right now, a lot of literary fiction uses it for self-conscious irony "and you the reader are not enjoying this, are you?". But that's not the only use. A modern example:
For old times' sake, the doctors of zoology had driven out of town that Tuesday afternoon to make a final visit to the singing salt dunes at Baritone Bay. And to lay a ghost. They never made it back alive. They almost never made it back at all.
Jim Crace, Being Dead. This book has some omniscient POV, some close third. It has to have omniscient, because the viewpoint characters are dead, and can speak only in flashbacks. To move forward in time, we need a narrator. The narrator has strongly-stated opinions about life and death and (most importantly) decay. That's part of what makes the book compelling. Crace couldn't have written that novel using limited-third. Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer write not just in omniscient third, but with a narrator who has opinions. I don't know what the technical term is; in my mind, there's a "transparent" third which simply narrates, and a present narrator who participates in the narrative. It's the difference between "John walked slowly forward and hit Sophia" and "John, whose temper had never been of the best and who had read far too much Mickey Spillane, hit Sophia." (Neither of which is great writing.) Right now, limited-viewpoint narration is in fashion, and it's a good strong fashion—it brings the reader tightly into the story. However, it also has weaknesses—you can't introduce a viewpoint that is not a character in the story, and if you use a viewpoint once, you should probably find a way to use it again. Third omniscient is the language your mother used to tell you stories. It is the language of fairy tales. It is a powerful tool, with deep ties to memory and emotion. The first stories you ever hear are third-omniscient. American children's picture books are (usually) third-omniscient. Goodnight, Moon. The Napping House. Sheep In A Jeep. When I cuddled my daughter and told stories, I said "Once upon a time there was a princess named Ellen who lived in a castle by the sea." Now, my daughter is named Ellen, but I didn't tell this in second person. And I certainly didn't tell it in third-limited. I framed the story as a story -- I said "Once upon a time". "Once upon a time" is magic. "I am the teller, and I am about to tell you a story, now pay attention." There is no "once upon a time" in third-limited, because there's nobody to say it. Third omniscient is ancient, and sometimes it's the only tool for the job.
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| cofax7 |
| 21 Oct 2003 17:03 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
| machete |
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Ooooh, excellent. Thanks so much, that helped hugely.
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| matociquala |
| 21 Oct 2003 18:08 (UTC) |
| *applauds* |
| headbang |
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Go. You.
I chased a link from melymbrosia to get here. And go you. *g*
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| rivkat |
| 21 Oct 2003 20:27 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
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Interesting points. Do you recommend the Jim Crace book? That quote stirred my interest.
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| jonquil |
| 22 Oct 2003 07:52 (UTC) |
| Being Dead |
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Yes, I recommend it. (I also recommend air.) Being Dead is one of the best novels I've read in the last five years. It's about death, yes. But it's also about love -- real love, flawed love, the kind in which you are terribly annoyed by your family and never quite understand them. It's from an explicitly atheist point of view in which there is no afterlife, and yet it defends the lasting importance of love.
And it's damned hard to persuade people to read, because one of the plot threads is corpses lying on a beach decaying. My husband had to recommend it repeatedly over three years before I gave in and read it. I was very glad I did.
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I think you've been recommending this to me for about a year, and I finally got a copy last Thursday. I haven't started it yet, though it's on the to-be-read shortlist.
This post reminds me quite a lot of Le Guin's essays.
I think there's still a place for long lyrical descriptions of scenery, but maybe that's a function of being an SF reader. I'm thinking of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, and the long lyrical descriptions of landscapes none of his readers could have seen--too-long, admittedly, but they still had a place in the books, which riff off 19th-C. triple-deckers in a lot of interesting ways.
Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer write not just in omniscient third, but with a narrator who has opinions. I don't know what the technical term is; in my mind, there's a "transparent" third which simply narrates, and a present narrator who participates in the narrative.
I think the terms you're looking for are autodiegetic, extradiegetic, heterodiegetic, homodiegetic, or intradiegetic--words which describe the narrator by his or her relationship to the world of the story. This seems to offer some good definitions.
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| embitca |
| 21 Oct 2003 20:46 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
| I'm supposed to resist the dark side? |
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This is really great. I've been floundering lately, feeling like I'm trapped in third-person limited by the dictates of my fandom, but the story I'm writing right now would work best in third-person omniscient and you've just given me some hooks to hang my thoughts on.
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| quine |
| 22 Oct 2003 03:40 (UTC) |
| Thank you |
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I've been wondering for a while about the spectrum of third person narration and this was hugely helpful. Do you have any opinions about other narrative points of view? It would be great to have a reference guide ::sheepish grin:: my ignorance astounds even me sometimes.
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| jonquil |
| 22 Oct 2003 09:24 (UTC) |
| Re: Thank you |
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The answer to "does JonquilS have an opinion?" is invariably "yes". Unfortunately, what I don't have is an essay.
Briefly: I like first person when it's done well, when I enjoy the voice of the narrator. I ADORE first person when there's an unreliable narrator. Unreliable narrators are fun. Second person almost always strikes me as a stunt; I can't think of a novel in second person I've loved. I have read good second-person short stories.
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I love that other people are having these thoughts at the same time I have. Three of my last five posts have been about POV in fiction, and trying to learn the difference. (May my past teachers and professors never hear that I didn't absorb this knowledge when they taught it.)
This morning I was wondering about third person omniscient, so I was quite pleased to see a link pointing to your post. I've pointed it out in my LJ now, too. Hope that's okay.
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| veejane |
| 22 Oct 2003 08:56 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
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I've had some bad experiences in fandom with readers being totally flummoxed by omniscience. (In one case, a bunch of people agreeing on what good limited-3rd-person I'd done, when I was spewing omniscient rhetoric like Dickens on amphetamines.)
I do like omniscience, and not just because I'm in the middle of a 19th century novel. (But it is nice, to read 100 pages of an irritating shallow woman and know, for sure, no guessing, that the author intends for me to find her irritating, because the author has said so herself on page 50. Reassuring, that.) I like being free of a single -- or even multiple -- character viewpoint, having free rein to metaphors and leaps of logic that the character himself would never think of or phrase that way.
And, after all, it allows me to indulge my own narrative voice, and write with the words and syntax I like to use, while still presenting a variety of characters. I don't feel free to do that as much in 3rd person limited, because I feel constrained to write somewhat as the viewpoint character would think. Omniscience. It's all about the authorial ego.
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| cofax7 |
| 22 Oct 2003 10:51 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
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I've had some bad experiences in fandom with readers being totally flummoxed by omniscience.
I'm one of them. I think partly it's because there appears to be a certain kind of coding for omniscient, and I wonder if it's particularly difficult for fanfic because the reader already knows the voices of the characters and is predisposed to expect a limited-3rd or first-person pov.
The big question is how to tell the reader THIS IS OMNISCIENT without actually saying that (although god knows I've seen fic where the header actually states "Mulder 3rd person pov"). Absent going completely into StoryTeller mode (as I ended up doing with "The MoneyChanger's Tale"), how is omniscient coded in such a way as to make it clear this is not third person limited with lots of head-jumping?
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| jonquil |
| 22 Oct 2003 12:14 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
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You have to cue it in the first paragraph. Look at all the examples I gave: in various ways, they're the written equivalent of a camera zooming in from a crane, moving from the general to the particular. Each of them calls attention to the narrator, by stating a proverb (Austen), addressing the reader (Tolkien), or giving information that is unavailable to the viewpoint character (Crace).
No matter how long she lived, Buffy would never know about Parker's tap dancing. Which was a pity, because he had snappy feet.
On the last day of her life, Scully threw a pencil at Mulder. By the time the avalanche of consequent events buried him, Mulder had completely forgotten the incident. Scully herself forgot it within seconds. But the pencil was the opening pebble, skittering down the scree of disaster.
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| rliz |
| 25 Oct 2003 19:12 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
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> they're the written equivalent of a camera zooming in from a crane
That's the metaphor I learned from my mother's fiction handouts--
When writers speak of "psychic", "authorial" or "narrative" distance they mean the space that the reader feels between herself and the characters and events in the story.
A simple analogy for psychic distance is the lens of a movie camera. Imagine the opening sequence of a film: The first view is shot from a helicopter. We see a panoramic scene of hills, trees, houses. Zoom a little, and here is a particular house. Closer, through the window, a room with people in it. Closer, the camera identifies a single subject among the crowd: a young boy sitting on a braided rug. Closer, we see his face. We see his eyes. Now, we are seeing through his eyes.
One way a writer can control distance is though diction and a careful selection of detail. Summaries, abstractions, and generalizations tend to keep the reader at arm’s length . Sharp details tend to pull the reader in. However, to say that specificity diminishes distance is a gross oversimplification; distance is, primarily, a matter of tone.
And, "scree". Heh.
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| (Anonymous) |
| 02 Feb 2008 10:49 (UTC) |
| omniscient narrator |
I have been reading your exposition on "omniscient narrator" with interest as I have read a novel who uses both first person in some chapters and omniscient in others....I felt at times that I was been "nannied" by so much information from the third person omniscient, as it tells you things which could be said only by a first person narrator...inner thoughts, feelings....I believe it is not completely faultless...
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| jonquil |
| 02 Feb 2008 17:39 (UTC) |
| Re: omniscient narrator |
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Like any other technique, it can be used very badly indeed; a subtle writer tells you through behavior, not merely through the narration. I'd love to know what novel that was.
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| (Anonymous) |
| 19 Aug 2006 16:53 (UTC) |
| third-omniscient |
Thanks for your essay. I am writing a novel set in Detroit and was wondering if a third person omniscient (with personality) pov could be a city?
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| (Anonymous) |
| 02 Sep 2007 19:58 (UTC) |
| Re: third-omniscient |
This has helped me as well, stumbling as I am in my first fiction-writing attempt in the context of the Three-Day Novel Contest. So far I've thought of myself as a memoir / essay writer, and it's all been first person. But third-person omniscient will do the trick nicely for the erotic historical novel set in Berlin in the 1920's that is coming to life under my fingertips. thanks, Nancy
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| vudynasty |
| 09 Jan 2008 05:36 (UTC) |
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Thank you for getting the word out on this versatile and time-tested mode of narration. I'm sure that this article is an eye-opener for many writers who've fallen victim to the scores of writing books out there that poo-poo the omniscient third-person, and instead advocate the limited third-person narration, as though it were some kind of truism of modern writing, superior to all other forms. "Self-Editing for Fiction Writers" by Renni Browne and Dave King is one such book.
Your article expands on the mechanics, rather than narrowing them to a select set.
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| jonquil |
| 10 Jan 2008 03:43 (UTC) |
| (no subject) |
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I'd be honored, but I should warn you this is very much of a miscellany -- not writing all the time but baking, sewing, politics.
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