Narration. Types of narration

What the reader thinks and feels will depend upon how the author allows him or her to see what is going on. The author is controlling the reader’s viewpoint. Various kinds of narration help him to do so.
The way authors relate events to readers is called narration. Novelists use different way of telling their stories: they use different characters to tell the stories (narrators) and present the events from different ‘angles’ (from different points of view).

First - person narrator.
The story is told by an “I”, who may be the main character in the novel or a minor character in the novel, an observer of events that happen to others.(Example of this is Nick in S. Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”, etc.).
There are some aspects of the first-person narration that are very important for readers.
• We feel very close to the narrator because we have access to the narrator’s mind and feelings. Empathy - putting oneself in someone else’s place - is something we are enable to experience in the first-person narration.
• Seeing into the heart and mind of the narrator allows the author to explore mental growth and change.
• We can know the world from a viewpoint other than our own. It may be that this is one of the attractions of the first-person narration.
When we follow a character through his or her life we can see how they adjust to the experience. It’s sometimes said that we know a first-person narrator better than any other characters. This is often the case, but it’s not always true. There are some characters presented through the third-person narrator whom we know very well. This is particularly true of the novels of G. Eliot and H. James.

Third-person narration.
In the novels written in the third person two main points of view are normally used: the omniscient point of view and the limited point of view.
The omniscient point of view means that the narrator knows everything about the events and the characters and knows all their thoughts and motives. But how much of all this does the narrator choose to reveal? There is a lot of room for variety here. These are the two extremes but there are possible variations in between:
intrusive                        objective
narrator <~~~~~~~~> (or unintrusive)
                                    narrator
An intrusive narrator explicitly tells the reader things, commenting on the characters.
An objective narrator simply shows things, without commenting or explaining: he is more like a camera.
The limited point of view means that, although the narrator tells the story in the third person, he confines himself to the impressions and feelings of one character in the novel: he presents only one point of view of events. The effect of this can be similar to that created by a first-person narrator.
Multiple narrators and multiple points of view.
Very often authors ( specially modern ones) experiment with the various effects produced by different narrators and points of view. This reflects typically twentieth century concerns: the complex nature of reality; the decline of belief in absolute truth; fascination with psychological analysis; a belief in the importance of individual experience and opinion.
Authors’ attitudes and irony.
Whenever you think about how a novel is narrated, you will also think about the attitude the author is taking up toward the characters and events. The author can take up virtually any attitude that he or she wants. The author’s attitude might be revealed directly by means of direct judgements (using epithets and metaphors) or indirectly.
There is one particular attitude that is very important in narration - irony. Irony occurs when a reader sees that the author is showing that there is a gap between what is thought to be true and what actually is true. Irony is created by different kinds of gaps between what is thought and what really is so.

There are many different kinds of gaps:
1. A character can say something that the reader sees is mistaken. Here the gap is between words and truth.
2. The gap is between words and meaning: a character may say something, the real meaning or implication of which is different from what the character supposes.
3. The gap is between intention and outcome: a character can expect certain events to happen, but the reader can see that things won’t work out as expected.
4. The gap is between appearance and reality: a character can interpret the world in one way, but the reader will see that this interpretation is wrong.

Some features of irony:
• irony is always against someone;
• irony is often a kind of alliance between the author and the reader;
• sometimes one irony undercuts another;
• irony is not always immediately apparent to the reader.

Flash back is a special device when the narrator interrupts the present time and returns to the past.
Inference is a device which enables the writer to be subtle or indirect, leaving the reader to infer or deduce the writer’s meaning.