The first-person narrative
When the author shifts the responsibility of telling the story to a first-person narrator, he actually provides two versions of one and the same-story, that is
the explicitly-expressed subjective version (the narrator’s version) and
the implied objective version, which the skilled reader is expected to understand.
To understand the implied objective version one should take into account which type of narrator the story-teller is and whether he is a reliable or an unreliable narrator.
It is the inner world of the character-narrator that is generally in the focus of the reader's attention that’s why many of the character’s actions, thoughts and decisions are understood. However, the first-person narrator may be unreliable as well as reliable. He may misinterpret some events (which he sometimes cannot fully understand). He relates them and evaluates them from his subjective point of view. The reader, therefore, gets a subjective view of the other characters. But this limitation can turn into an advantage, as the reader is stimulated to think for himself and to make his own judgment.
The omniscient author
There are no limitations on the freedom of the omniscient author. He is all seeing and all knowing. He can get inside his characters' minds, add his own analysis of their motives and actions. It is the author’s voice, his opinion of the events and characters that the reader hears and, therefore, the latter can easily see the author's point of view.
However, the objectivity of the author's evidence should be taken for granted by the reader. The omniscient author may reveal the viewpoints of the characters or assume a detached attitude and tell the readers all about his characters concealing his point of view.
In quite a number of modern short stories since A.P. Chekhov the omniscient author appears to have a limited omniscient point of view. The author chooses one character, whose thoughts and actions are analyzed, giving no analysis of other characters. The author therefore can be omniscient.
The omniscient author may tell the story so vividly that his presence is forgotten, the characters and the scenes become visible.
The observer-author
In the case of the observer-author, the story is a scene or a series of scenes, narrated by an onlooker who does not interfere for any comments or reflections of these events. Actions and events themselves are in the focus or the reader's attention. The advantage of this narrative method is that the observer-author lets the reader see, hear and judge the characters and their actions for himself.
A story told by the observer-author may be presented in either pictorial or dramatic form.
A story is said to have a dramatic form, when one scene, follows another and the characters act and speak as in drama, where nobody comments upon or explains the scenes, they just appear
A story is considered to have a pictorial form when the observer-author pictures the scenes, but he tells of what anyone might see and hear in his position without entering into the minds of any of the characters, without analyzing their motives.
In one and the same literary work the author may vary the narrative method, at one time giving the reader a character’s version of events, at another assuming omniscience, or narrating as an onlooker.
The narrative method conditions the language of the story. Thus, if it is told by an omniscient author, the language tends to be literary. When the story is told by a character, the language becomes a means of characterization. It reflects the narrator's education, occupation, emotional state and attitude, etc. The social standing of the character is marked by the use of non-standard vocabulary and the choice of syntactic structures.