Third-person omniscient narrative

The third-person omniscient is a narrative mode in which a story is presented by a narrator with an overarching point of view, seeing and knowing everything that happens within the world of the story, including what each of the characters is thinking and feeling. It is the most common narrative mode found in sprawling, epic stories such as J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings or George Eliot's Middlemarch.

The godlike all-knowing perspective of the third-person omniscient allows the narrator to tell the reader things that none of the characters know, or indeed things that no human being could ever know (e.g., what the first conscious creature felt like as it climbed out of the primordial ooze, in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy). Hence the third-person omniscient is most often associated with sweeping, epic stories, in contrast to third-person limited narratives, which do not stray beyond the characters' knowledge and experiences, and are most often associated with more intimate stories. Nevertheless, Jane Austen's novels are third-person omniscient, sometimes giving us information that the character of focus (as opposed to the point of view character) could not be aware of, but Austen's novels typically focus on a small number of characters and their milieu.

The third-person omniscient point of view maintains the omniscient narrator's viewpoint throughout the piece, in contrast to the third-person limited point of view, which restricts narration to what can be known, seen, thought, or judged from a single character's perspective (the point of view character), but may change that point of view many times during the piece ("third person multiple" is the term sometimes used to describe this variation of "third-person limited").

See also

• Narrative mode

References

Notes

Bibliography

• Herman, David; Jahn, Manfred; Ryan, Marie-Laure (2005), Routledge Encyclopedia of of Narratice Theory, Taylor & Francis, ISBN 9780415282598