No type of third-person narrator appears as a character in a story. The omniscient narrator is all-knowing. From this point of view, the narrator can move from place to place and pass back and forth through time, slipping into and out of characters as no human being possibly could in real life. This narrator can report the characters’ thoughts and feelings as well as what they say and do. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil,” the narrator can move deftly into the minds of the minister (Mr. Hooper), his wife, and all the members of his church. When Hooper dies, the narrator proclaims, “[A]wful is still the thought that [his face] moldered beneath the Black Veil!” This kind of intrusion is called editorial omniscience. In contrast, narration that allows characters’ actions and thoughts to speak for themselves is known as neutral omniscience. Most modern writers use neutral omniscience so that readers can reach their own conclusions.
The limited omniscient narrator is much more confined than the omniscient narrator. With limited omniscience the author very often restricts the narrator to the single perspective of either a major or a minor character. Sometimes a narrator can see into more than one character, particularly in a longer work that focuses, for example, on two characters alternately from one chapter to the next. Short stories, however, frequently are restricted by length to a single character’s point of view. The way people, places, and events appear to that character is the way they appear to the reader. The reader has access to the thoughts and feelings of the characters revealed by the narrator, but neither the reader nor the character has access to the inner lives of any of the other characters in the story. The events in Katherine Mansfield’s “Miss Brill” are viewed entirely through the protagonist’s eyes; we see a French vacation town as an elderly woman does. Miss Brill represents the central consciousness of the story. She unifies the story by being present through all the action. We are not told of anything that happens away from the character because the narration is based on her perception of things.
In Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home,” a limited omniscient narrator is the predominant point of view. Krebs’s thoughts and reaction to being home from the war are made available to the reader by the narrator, who tells us that Krebs “felt embarrassed and resentful” or “sick and vaguely nauseated” by the small-town life he has reentered. (Phrases like “He thought,” “She felt,” “She remembered,” and so forth should clue you in to the fact that this narrative is filtered through a character’s consciousness.) Occasionally, Hemingway uses an objective point of view when he dramatizes particularly tense moments between Krebs and his mother. In this excerpt, Hemingway’s narrator shows us Krebs’s feelings instead of telling us what they are. Krebs’s response to his mother’s concerns is presented without comment. The external details of the scene reveal his inner feelings.
“I’ve worried about you so much, Harold,” his mother went on. “I know the temptations you must have been exposed to. I know how weak men are. I know what your own dear grandfather, my own father, told us about the Civil War and I have prayed for you. I pray for you all day long, Harold.”
Krebs looked at the bacon fat hardening on his plate.
“Your father is worried, too,” his mother went on. “He thinks you have lost your ambition, that you haven’t got a definite aim in life. Charley Simmons, who is just your age, has a good job and is going to be married. The boys are all settling down; they’re all determined to get somewhere; you can see that boys like Charley Simmons are on their way to being really a credit to the community.”
Krebs said nothing.
“Don’t look that way, Harold….”
When Krebs looks at the bacon fat, we can see him cooling and hardening too. Hemingway does not describe the expression on Krebs’s face, yet we know it is a look that disturbs his mother as she goes on about what she thinks she knows. Krebs and his mother are clearly tense and upset; the details, action, and dialogue reveal that without the narrator telling the reader how each character feels.
The most intense use of a central consciousness in narration can be seen in the stream-of-consciousness technique developed by modern writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner. This technique takes a reader inside a character’s mind to reveal perceptions, thoughts, and feelings on a conscious or unconscious level. A stream of consciousness suggests the flow of thought as well as its content; hence complete sentences may give way to fragments as the character’s mind makes rapid associations free of conventional logic or transitions.
The following passage is from Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), a novel famous for its extended use of this technique. In this paragraph Joyce takes us inside the mind of a character who is describing a funeral:
Coffin now. Got here before us, dead as he is. Horse looking round at it with his plume skeowways [askew]. Dull eye: collar tight on his neck, pressing on a blood-vessel or something. Do they know what they cart out of here every day? Must be twenty or thirty funerals every day. Then Mount Jerome for the protestants. Funerals all over the world everywhere every minute. Shovelling them under by the cartload doublequick. Thousands every hour. Too many in the world.
The character’s thoughts range from specific observations to speculations about death. Joyce creates the illusion that we are reading the character’s thoughts as they occur. The stream-of-consciousness technique provides an intimate perspective on a character’s thoughts.
In contrast, the objective point of view employs a narrator who does not see into the mind of any character. From this detached and impersonal perspective, the narrator reports action and dialogue without telling us directly what the character feels and thinks. We observe the characters in much the same way we would perceive events in a film or play: we supply the meanings; no analysis or interpretation is provided by the narrator. This point of view places a heavy premium on dialogue, actions, and details to reveal character. Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” is a good example of this type of narration. Note how the narrator of that story is factual, like a reporter. Instead of telling us “Mrs. Delacroix felt dread as she anticipated what would happen next,” the objective narrator says, “She held her breath while her husband went forward.” We feel more removed from the characters in this story than we might in another story in which we are permitted to enter their minds.