Get Yours Today What Is The Omniscient Point Of View And How Can You Use It To Your Advantage? The omniscient narrator feeds us information about characters and plot in a structured, orderly way to maximise atmosphere, tension and suspense. The omniscient narrative voice is totally in charge of the story: like a director, pointing you towards images and people as it sees fit, acting in the same way as a camera. It also allows the narrator to paint a wider picture and create suspense. The narrative switches from Sebastian to the people on the buses but the voice, being omniscient, is able to convince the reader it knows what’s going on. Outside, buses clattered down the road, bursting with commuters on their way to work, checking their newspapers, feeling for loose change in their pockets, staring at pigeons, little knowing that what was happening in this tiny room off Whitehall would affect each and every one of them today…” The commander was tapping his fingers on the table-top. The light was dim, electricity guttering, their faces obscure. “When Sebastian walked through the heavy committee room door, a group of people were already there, seated and rustling papers. It is also known as an intrusive narrator and is (usually) in the third person singular:
The narrator has greater insight into the narrative events context and the characters’ motives, unspoken thoughts, and experiences, than any individual character does. Omniscient Narrator: DefinitionĪn omniscient narrator is the all-knowing voice in a story. It’s a powerful tool, and if used properly, it can lend an authoritative sheen to your work. The effect of it suggests there is a separate entity from the other characters in the book, able to see all of them and even know what’s happening in their hearts and minds. It’s what we’ve been brought up on: Once upon a time, there was a little princess… Of course, the narrator / narrative voice isn’t actually omniscient (he/she isn’t God). When you sit down to tell your story, you may find your writing naturally falls into it. Homer’s Iliad, which stands at the very beginning of Western literature, is a fine example of a narrator who knows everything: the gods, the heroes, even the details of individual battles. The omniscient narrator has been used for centuries. Ian McEwan’s third person Atonement presents itself as a straightforward novel, but actually has a sting in the tail, which causes the reader to question all that has gone before you can contrast this with Kazuo Ishiguro’s first person The Remains of the Day, where the narrator isn’t quite telling us the truth. This can be delivered in the first person or the third person. Novelists began to play games with perception, and the unreliable narrator came to the fore. With the rise of post-modernism and other theories that questioned accepted fictional structures, the omniscient narrator fell out of fashion. Point of view is important and allows the writer to play with perspective. Most contemporary novelists write in the third person limited, which means that the narrative is limited to what the protagonist knows, and everything is filtered through the protagonist’s viewpoint. Do you want to be intimate, and employ the first person? J D Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye is a fine example of this at its most gripping and involving, as is Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now. Or do you want to adopt something that’s more universal, such as a third person omniscient point of view? One of the very first things you’ll need to consider, and one of the most important, is which narrative voice to use. When you sit down to write, with that all-important, all-consuming story bursting to get out of your mind and onto the page, you’re facing a multitude of decisions to do with technique and style. In this article, guest author, Philip Womack, discusses the omniscient narrator, and answers the question ‘what does omniscient mean?’.
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