Narration

A first-person point of view reveals the story through a participant narrator. First person creates a close relationship between the narrator and reader, by referring to the viewpoint character with first person pronouns like I (or we, if the narrator is part of a larger group).[12] That is, the narrator openly acknowledges their own existence. Frequently, the first-person narrator is the protagonist, whose inner thoughts are expressed to the audience, even if not to any of the other characters. A first person narrator with limited omniscience is not able to witness or understand all facets of any situation. Thus, a narrator with this perspective will not be able to report the circumstances fully and will leave the reader with a subjective record of the plot details. Additionally, this narrator's character could be pursuing a hidden agenda or may be struggling with mental or physical challenges that further hamper their ability to tell the reader the whole, accurate truth of events. This form includes temporary first-person narration as a story within a story, wherein a narrator or character observing the telling of a story by another is reproduced in full, temporarily and without interruption shifting narration to the speaker. The first-person narrator can also be the focal character.

The second-person point of view is a point of view where the audience is made a character. This is done with the use of second-person pronouns like you. The narrator may be addressing the audience directly, but more often the second-person referent of these stories is a character within the story. Stories and novels in second person are comparatively uncommon. Examples include the novel Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas by Tom Robbins, the short fiction of Lorrie Moore and Junot Díaz, the short story The Egg by Andy Weir, and in French, Second Thoughts by Michel Butor.

"You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy."—Opening lines of Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City (1984)

The Choose Your Own Adventure gamebooks are written in second person.

In the third-person narrative mode, the narrator refers to all characters with third person pronouns like he, she, or they, and never first- or second-person pronouns. This makes it clear that the narrator is an unspecified entity or uninvolved person who conveys the story and is not a character of any kind within the story, or at least is not referred to as such.[13]

Traditionally, third-person narration is the most commonly used narrative mode in literature. It does not require that the narrator's existence be explained or developed as a particular character, as would be the case with a first-person narrator. It thus allows a story to be told without detailing any information about the teller (narrator) of the story. Instead, a third-person narrator is often simply some disembodied commentary or voice, rather than a fully developed character. Sometimes, third-person narration is called the "he/she" perspective,[14] and, on even rarer occasions, author/omniscient point of view.

While the tendency for novels (or other narrative works) is to adopt a single point of view throughout the entire novel, some authors have utilized other points of view that, for example, alternate between different first-person narrators or alternate between a first- and a third-person narrative mode. The ten books of the Pendragon adventure series, by D. J. MacHale, switch back and forth between a first-person perspective (handwritten journal entries) of the main character along his journey as well as a disembodied third-person perspective focused on his friends back home.[15] Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace provides one character's viewpoint from first-person as well as another character's from third-person limited. Often, a narrator using the first person will try to be more objective by also employing the third person for important action scenes, especially those in which they are not directly involved or in scenes where they are not present to have viewed the events in firsthand. This mode is found in Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible. In William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, even the perspective of a deceased person is included.

Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife alternates between an art student named Clare, and a librarian named Henry. John Green & David Levithan's novel Will Grayson, Will Grayson rotates between two boys both named Will Grayson. It alternates between both boys telling their part of the story, how they meet and how their lives then come together. Nick Hornby's A Long Way Down has four narrators, who also are its main characters. These four characters meet at the top of a tall building known as "the suicide spot" and begin to talk instead of jumping. They then form a group and continue to meet up.

A stream of consciousness voice gives the (typically first-person) narrator's perspective by attempting to replicate the thought processes—as opposed to simply the actions and spoken words—of the narrative character. Often, interior monologues and inner desires or motivations, as well as pieces of incomplete thoughts, are expressed to the audience but not necessarily to other characters. Examples include the multiple narrators' feelings in William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, and the character Offred's often fragmented thoughts in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Irish writer James Joyce exemplifies this style in his novel Ulysses.

One of the most common narrative voices, used especially with first- and third-person viewpoints, is the character voice, in which a story's character is presented as the narrator; this character is called a "viewpoint character". In this situation, the narrator is no longer an unspecified entity; rather, the narrator is a more relatable, realistic character who may or may not be involved in the actions of the story and who may or may not take a biased approach in the storytelling. If the character is directly involved in the plot, this narrator is also called the viewpoint character. The viewpoint character is not necessarily the focal character: examples of supporting viewpoint characters include Doctor Watson, Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, and Nick Carraway of The Great Gatsby.

The unreliable narrative voice involves the use of an untrustworthy narrator. This mode may be employed to give the audience a deliberate sense of disbelief in the story or a level of suspicion or mystery as to what information is meant to be true and what is meant to be false. Unreliable narrators are usually first-person narrators; however, a third-person narrator may be unreliable.[16] In J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, the voice of Holden Caufield, the novel's narrator is biased, juvenile, and unreliable.

The epistolary narrative voice uses a series of letters and other documents to convey the plot of the story. One example is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which is a story written in a sequence of letters. Another is Bram Stoker's Dracula, which tells the story in a series of diary entries, letters and newspaper clippings. Les Liaisons dangereuses ('Dangerous Liaisons'), by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, is again made up of the correspondence between the main characters, most notably the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont. Langston Hughes does the same thing in a shorter form in his story "Passing", which consists of a young man's letter to his mother. C. S. Lewis demonstrates this style in The Screwtape Letters.

The third-person modes are usually categorized along two axes. The first is the subjectivity/objectivity axis, with third person subjective narration involving one or more characters' personal feelings and thoughts, and third person objective narration not describing the feelings or thoughts of any characters but, rather, just the exact facts of the story. Third-person modes may also be categorized along the omniscient/limited axis. A third person omniscient narrator conveys information from multiple characters, places, and events of the story, including any given characters' thoughts, and a third person limited narrator conveys the knowledge and subjective experience of just one character. Third person narration, in both its limited and omniscient variants, became the most popular narrative perspective during the 20th century.

Historically, the third-person omniscient (or simply omniscient) perspective has been the most commonly used in narrative writing; it is seen in countless classic novels, including works by Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, and George Eliot. A story in this narrative mode 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.[17] It sometimes even takes a subjective approach. One advantage of narrative omniscience is that it enhances the sense of objective reliability (that is, apparent truthfulness) of the plot, which may be important with more complex narratives. The third-person omniscient narrator is the least capable of being unreliable—although the character of omniscient narrator can have its own personality, offering judgments and opinions on the behavior of the story characters.

The third-person subjective mode is when the narrator conveys the thoughts, feelings, and opinions of one or more characters. If this is just one character, it can be termed third-person limited, in which the reader is limited to the thoughts of some particular character (often the protagonist) as in the first-person mode, except still giving personal descriptions using third-person pronouns. This is almost always the main character (for example, Gabriel in James Joyce's The Dead, Nathaniel Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown, or Santiago in Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea). Certain third-person omniscient modes are also classifiable as using the third person, subjective mode when they switch between the thoughts and feelings of all the characters.

In contrast to the broad, sweeping perspectives seen in many 19th-century novels, third-person subjective is sometimes called the "over the shoulder" perspective; the narrator only describes events perceived and information known by a character. At its narrowest and most subjective scope, the story reads as though the viewpoint character were narrating it; dramatically this is very similar to the first person, in that it allows in-depth revelation of the protagonist's personality, but it uses third-person grammar. Some writers will shift perspective from one viewpoint character to another, such as in Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time, or George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire.

The third-person objective mode employs a narrator who tells a story without describing any character's thoughts, opinions, or feelings; instead, it gives an objective, unbiased point of view. Often the narrator is self-dehumanized in order to make the narrative more neutral. This type of narrative mode is often seen outside of fiction in newspaper articles, biographical documents, and scientific journals. This narrative mode can be described as a "fly-on-the-wall" or "camera lens" approach that can only record the observable actions but does not interpret these actions or relay what thoughts are going through the minds of the characters. Works of fiction that use this style emphasize characters acting out their feelings observably. Internal thoughts, if expressed, are given voice through an aside or soliloquy. While this approach does not allow the author to reveal the unexpressed thoughts and feelings of the characters, it does allow the author to reveal information that not all or any of the characters may be aware of. An example of this so-called camera-eye perspective is "Hills Like White Elephants" by Ernest Hemingway.

This narrative mode is also called third-person dramatic because the narrator, like the audience of a drama, is neutral and ineffective toward the progression of the plot—merely an uninvolved onlooker.

The third person indirect style is a method of presenting a character's voice freely and spontaneously in the middle of an otherwise third-person non-personal narrator.

Many stories, especially in literature, alternate between the third person limited and third person omniscient. In this case, an author will move back and forth between a more omniscient third-person narrator to a more personal third-person limited narrator. Typically, like the A Song of Ice and Fire series by George R. R. Martin, a switch of third-person limited viewpoint on some character is done only at chapter boundaries. The Home and the World, written in 1916 by Rabindranath Tagore, is another example of a book switching among just three characters at chapter boundaries. In The Heroes of Olympus series, the point of view changes between characters at intervals. The Harry Potter series is told in third-person limited for much of the seven novels, but deviates to omniscient on occasions, particularly during the opening chapters of later novels in the series, which switch from the limited view of the eponymous Harry to other characters (for example, the Muggle Prime Minister in the Half-Blood Prince).[18]