6/21/2023 0 Comments Omniscient narrator point of view![]() ![]() ![]() It is also not a careless slap-dash style that has persisted in the work of inept or slovenly writers despite repeated attempts to stamp it out. The first person omniscient is not a postmodern fad or indeed a symptom of a qualitatively new kind of cultural megalomania (however tempting it is to make such an argument). “The author?” “I’m Zuckerman the author.”)Īnd there’s Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes in the Museum, in which Ruby Lennox – in the tradition of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy – narrates her family’s life from the moment of her own conception. Then, of course, there’s Philip Roth’s trilogy of American life – American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain – in which Roth creates a kind of first person alibi by getting his alter-ego, the writer Nathan Zuckerman, to narrate the characters stories for him (“You’re Zuckerman?” replied, vigorously shaking my hand. Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin uses a similar device, also narrating the last chapter in the first person (“If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next-if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions-you’d be doomed. (“When I first entered heaven I thought everybody saw what I saw”). Perhaps the best known example is Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, which is narrated by the ‘I’ protagonist Susie Salmon who can see what occurs everywhere and anywhere because she is dead. Writers have had all sorts of fun inventing tricksy devices to account for this flagrant “rule-breaking”. (As opposed to a traditional first person that is limited to the thoughts, feelings and language of the narrating character.) These would-be omniscient ‘I’s habitually gain access to the thoughts and feelings of other characters, happily narrate scenes from which they are physically or mentally absent, and round out the social and cultural context of their stories with a welter of telling details. (That is, the literary attributes associated with the all-seeing, all-knowing third person perspective familiar to readers of the 19th century novel.) Yet the same decades that saw the proliferation of such edgy literary phenomena as the first person present tense have also been marked by the discrete emergence of a qualitatively different kind of “I” – an “I” that attempts to break free of the technical constraints traditionally imposed by a first person narration to take on the attributes of omniscience. In an age of uncertainty, in which truth is apparently an illusion and all claims to authority are suspect, it is tempting to believe that a first person narrator telling their own story – in a style that is skewed, fragmentary, and unreliable – is the only point of view that can strike a chord of authenticity with the reader. ![]()
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