o There are also third-person narrations that presume the reader’s
intimacy with the social setting and the worldview of the
author, such as Jane Austen in 3ULGHDQG3UHMXGLFH.o In the 20th century, the stream-of-consciousness third person
of such books as 0UV'DOORZD\ doesn’t seem as though it’s
speaking to anyone outside of the character, let alone outside
of the novel. Even though the novel is technically in the third
person, the effect of reading 0UV'DOORZD\’s narrative voice is
like eavesdropping on each character’s thoughts as they happen.Temporal Distance
z The other element of point of view and voice that we need to consider
is the distance in time from which the story is told. Partly, this is simply
a matter of verb tense, but it’s also about a larger issue, namely, the
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from the events being depicted.
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narrator is to the events he or she is describing. Huck Finn is told mainly
in the past tense, but the implication of Huck’s voice throughout the
book is that he is still a boy, telling us about a series of events that have
happened in the recent past. In other words, it’s a story about a child told
by the child.
z We get a slightly different effect from Harper Lee’s 7R .LOO D
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novel, is deliberately ambiguous. At times, her narration is immediate
and limited to what she knew as a young girl, but the novel also steps
back and narrates the events from the point of view of Scout as a grown
woman, looking back on her childhood. We get a child’s-eye view of
childhood leavened with an adult’s retrospective explanation of events
that Scout as a child wouldn’t have fully understood.
z This element of temporal distance from the events in the narrative is just
as important with third-person narratives. Being the default tense of so
many narratives, the past tense doesn’t necessarily mean the distant past: