2. Limited omniscient point of view (third-person or selective omniscient)

Narrator limits his ability to penetrate the minds of characters by selecting a single character to act as the center of revelation.

What the reader knows and sees of events = what the focal character can know or see.

Differs significantly from the first-person point of view.

Sometimes - direct access to this focal character's own "voice" and thoughts through dialogue or monologue or stream of consciousness.

Sometimes - indirect access: narrator's voice sidelines

- that tells the story

- transmits the action

- characterizes

- describes

- analyses

- gives other informing details

Narrative center = “he” or “she”, may be the protagonist or may be some other major character (e.g., Charles Marlow in Conrad's Heart of Darkness).

Sometimes = minor character = onlooker, watching and speculating from the periphery of the story and only minimally involved, if at all, in its action.

This character's mind and eyes = the story's angle of vision and the point of entry for the reader.

Henry James calls this character "the reflector" or "mirroring consciousness", for it is through the prism of his or her conscious mind that the story is filtered and reflected.

Advantages - tightness of focus and control and the intensity of treatment. Suited to the short story.

Works well as a means of creating and sustaining irony, because it can exploit the disparity between what the focal character thinks he or she knows and the true state of affairs.

3. First person point of view.

Narrator refers to himself or herself as "I" in the story and addresses the reader as "you", either explicitly or by implication.

Combines the advantages and restrictions of limited omniscience with his own.

= limited omniscience: tightly controlled and limited in its access to information. The first-person narrator is free to speculate, but can only report information that falls within his own first-hand knowledge of the world or what he comes to learn second hand from others; is necessarily subjective, experiences only their own thoughts and feelings, subjectively in their perceptions of the world cause prejudices and biases => necessary to pay particular attention to that character – to his or her personality; built-in biases, values, and beliefs; and degree of awareness and perceptivity – to measure his reliability as a narrator.

Advantages: sense of immediacy, credibility, and psychological realism

Degree of involvement with the events of the plot

1) Protagonists (Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn) - tell the stories of their own lives and adventures.

Protagonist-narrator is always firmly in control of the content, pace, and method of presentation.

Certain events - fully or partially dramatized as the protagonist witnessed them; others - transmitted to the reader indirectly through the use of summary and comment.

Dominate their works to the disadvantage of other characters, and by continually calling attention to their own presence, and to their own thoughts and feelings, fully characterize themselves in the process.

Their stories frequently illustrate their growth and maturation. If not = ready-made subject for irony.

Protagonist-narrators may narrate events

• ostensibly as they take place (Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe),

• in leisurely retrospect = narrator looks backward over a period of time on adventures that have already been concluded (Pip in Charles Dickens' Great Expectations)

E.g.: A particularly good example of the way in which protagonist-narrators are established as the narrative authority of their works is found in the opening lines of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn:

You don't know about me, without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied, one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly – Tom's Aunt Polly, she is – and Mary, and the Widow Douglas, is all told about in that book – which is mostly a true book; with some stretchers, as I said before.

– From The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain [1885]

Not all protagonist-narrators tell their own stories.

Sometimes tell someone else's story (Nick Carraway, the protagonist of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, is charged with the responsibility of telling Jay Gatsby's).

Narrative focus is shifted → characterization of such narrators will be less fully developed

Purpose is the same: to record the impact of the story upon the growth and maturation of the narrator.

Often - not the protagonist at all, but a secondary character.

May have almost no visible role in the plot and exist as a convenient device for transmitting the narrative to the reader (e.g.: the narrators of Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher and Conrad's Heart of Darkness).

Only partially characterized and remain little more than disembodied voices distinguishable only by the fact that they address the reader in the first person.

Advantages:

• have greater freedom of movement, may move among the other characters, using them as sources to acquire helpful information.

• often appear in the role of confidant, as genial and sympathetic personalities in whose wisdom and judgment (or presumed neutrality) others seem willing, or even desperate, to confide.