3rd Person Narration

Lessons in Third Person Narration

It’s quite possible to tell a story in third person with almost no narration.  The “camera” is simply centered in the head of the third person main character, and we experience the story as if we “are” that person, experientially.

 “The girl Ryan Callaway was following turned off the Boulevard St. Michel, where Ryan knew every shop and office, and onto a side street that he hadn’t been on before, even though he had been wandering the city streets for weeks.  She walked past a papeterie and an abandoned shoe store and an art gallery selling glossy prints of American movie posters and then led the way into a dimly lit office that once might have been used by an insurance salesman.  To Ryan the room smelled like his parents’ basement back in the states, a wet and musty resting place for the broken appliances and old clothes the family couldn’t bring themselves to part with…”

                        Opening from “Numerology” by Christian Michener

 Here about the only concession to a narrator is to call Ryan by his first and last name, which he would not do himself, internally.  Otherwise, we experience everything as Ryan does, in a scene.  The only information we are provided is through his senses.  We are thoroughly limited to his head.  Later in the story, there is some background information provided, but it is done as “daydreaming” on Ryan’s part or sort of memory on Ryan’s part — events he has lived through, such as news of his parents’ separation.  Many stories are told this way.  They have the advantage of putting you right in the character, “suspending your disbelief,” and making you experience right along with the character.  On the downside, they limit you as the writer to a plot-driven, scene by scene story.  You are limited in terms of getting through a lot of background information quickly, having some angle on the character that he or she might not have on him or herself, of using language that the character himself can’t use, and creating density.  There’s no real narrative “voice” to this story.  We are not being told a story, we’re being shown one.

Other examples of narrator-less third person point of view stories:

“ ‘Hey, Captain,’ Stuart said.  He’d seen the dog as soon as he turned the corner, stretched over the doorsill of the bar in a wide amber beam of the afternoon sun.  ‘Hey, babe, you still remember me?’ He hesitated, just outside the doorway, in case the big German Shepherd did not remember him after all.  No doubt that Captain was a lot older now, shrunken into his bagging skin, the hair along the ridge of his back turning white.  A yellow eye opened briefly on Stuart and then drowsed slowly back shut.  Stuart took a long step over the dog and was inside the shadowy space of the bar.”

            Opening of “Finding Natasha” by Madison Smartt Bell

“Janet woke suddenly.  She could tell, even with the blinds closed, that it was early on a cold day.  Well, February was unpredictable in San Francisco.  And Valentine’s Day was unpredictable anywhere.  She felt a stab of self-pity about her solitary state and snuggled under the covers.  No, she was wide awake.  She would make the most of today because she was behind on her taxes and on her tapestry orders.  Christ!  The Federal Express truck was supposed to collect the last piece for the New York gallery this morning and she hadn’t even completed the address form.”

            Opening of “Valentine’s Day” by Valerie Miner

It is also possible to have a third person story with a limited omniscient narrator.  This is very very common in third person short stories.  In fact, it is difficult to tell a story about a third person character without a narrator.  Limited omniscient means that the narrator is limited to what the third person main character, the protagonist, can know or perceive, and also to what is within the character’s knowledge, such as background information, description, the past.  The narrator stands a little behind the main character, rather than right inside him or her, as above, and can comment on what the characters perceives or knows or what is within his or her knowledge. 

“Mark flung a final shovelful of cement into the mixer and stuck the spade in a pile of sand.  ‘She’ll be done soon!’ he hollered at Elmer, who was knocking the forms off a fresh burial vault.  Elmer nodded and coughed.  Like Mark, he wore a red bandanna across his face.  The air inside the Sunwall Brothers’ Vault Company was heavy with fine gray dust.  By the end of the day his lungs felt so thick that more than once as he sank into sleep Mark had imagined his lungs were hardening, slowly turning into concrete.  Still, it was the best summer job he’d ever had.  The day was decent, Elmer was good if quiet company, and the nearness of death made him feel serious, adult, and curiously alive.”

            Opening of “You Ain’t Dead Yet” by Barton Sutter

Here we have the lightest of narrators: it is the narrator who tells us, for example, that Elmer is also wearing a bandanna, and that the air in the vault company is heavy with fine gray dust.  Mark can and does perceive these things, but they are being told to us by a narrator.  We begin, in this example, to hear a voice outside the third person character, a limited omniscient narrator who will tell us what we need to know, but in an almost invisible way, so close is the narrator to Mark’s own perceptions and knowledge.  Still, it’s an important distinction, because now this narrator, established in the beginning, can give us information as needed.  But again, once the initial terms are set, the narrator must pretty much adhere to such a narrow omniscience as established in the opening.  For example, later in the story, the narrator gives us this bit of description: “The river was slowed here by a series of small dams and backed into marshes and mudflats to form the Deep River Wildlife Refuge.  The water was low this time of the year, and the breeze blew the rank stick of the exposed bottom through the cab of the truck.  Mark noticed a raft of big white birds floating far out.”  Mark is there, perceiving, but it is actually the narrator who describes the river, not Mark.  We hardly notice, so minimal is the narrator’s intrusion.  Just the necessary information to set the scene, then disappear. 

In the next example, we hear a third person limited omniscient narrator who is more “assertive” in a sense than the last one.  We are much more conscious of the narrator telling the story.  Again, we will be centered in one character, Susan, but we are also conscious that the story is not being told/shown simply from inside her head.  There is another consciousness/voice that is narrating the story.  Again, this narrator is “limited omniscient,” limited to focusing on and through Susan.  The narrator can give us information about her.  The narrator has separated more from the main character than in the last example.

“The woman, who likes to be called Susan, not Sue, looks down at her hands in her lap; and when she looks up, still listening, the man once again catches her eye.  He has dark, curly hair and a mustache.  His look is steady, absorbed, savoring, unabashedly sexual.  She has no idea how long he has been staring.

            The audience for the lecture is arranged in a horseshoe around the lectern, which places Susan and the man, though 20 feet apart, virtually face to face.  If she looks straight ahead, she cannot avoid him.”

            Opening from “Rose” by Margaret Edwards

Hear the narrator in the line, “The woman, who likes to be called Susan, not Sue,,,”?  That is a voice that is not in the character’s head.  It is the limited omniscient narrator narrating the story before moving into Sue’s experiential action of looking down at her hands.  If it were purely scenic, it would start: “Sue looks down at her hand in her lap…”  A very different sense of distance and control. 

In the next example, there’s a very strong third person limited omniscient narrator.  This narrator gives us a lot of information — all of which Jane, the main character is privy to — but it’s separated from Jane-in-a-scene.  It’s background, context, and the narrator sets the story up by giving us some initial information, rather than becoming “stuck” in having to show everything.  Then the narrator, strongly established from the start, can continue to shape and manipulate the material, even as it becomes more and more scenic, as we focus more and more on Jane and her feelings and experience. 

“Jane’s husband, Martin, works for the fire department.  He’s on four days, off three; on three, off four.  It’s the kind of shift work that allows plenty of time for sustained recreation, and during the off times Martin likes to do a lot of socializing with his two shift mates, Wally Harmon and Teddy Lynch.  The three of them are like brothers: they bicker and squabble and compete in a friendly way about everything, including their common hobby, which is the making and flying of model airplanes.  …In a way, Jane is the outsider here: the Harmons have known Martin most of his life, and Teddy Lynch was once point guard, to Martin’s power forward, on their high school basketball team.  Jane is relatively new, having come to Illinois from Virginia only two years ago, when Martin brought her back with him from his reserves training there.

            This evening, [my bold—the story actually begins, scenically] a hot September twilight, they’re sitting on lawn chairs in the dim light of the coals in Martin’s portable grill, talking about games…”

            Opening of “The Fireman’s Wife”

Hear how much the narrator packs in as information, by telling us the context initially but in vivid, specific detail.  Think how much space and time it would take to “show” all that!  You couldn’t do it; you need a narrator to get it down.  And notice how dense it makes the story, rather than a more diluted “showing.”

By the second paragraph, we have moved to a specific evening, and the actual story can begin.  The story is Jane’s story, her experience, and we will adhere to her as the main point of view character with this limited omniscient narrator throughout the story.  The narrator recedes as the story gets underway, but can come in to give information, background, description. But this narrator, being limited, CANNOT go into anyone else’s thoughts and feelings.  Only Jane’s.

 Here, later in the story, we see how we get close into Jane and her inner feelings.  The limited omniscient narrator doesn’t foreclose that by any means.

            “Two boys from high school come past, and one of them winks at Jane.  She remembers how it was in high school — the games of flirtation and pursuit, of ignoring some people and noticing others.  That seemed like such an unbearable time, and it’s already years ago.  She watches Eveline light yet another cigarette, and feels very much older than her memory of herself.  She sees the person she is now, with Martin, somewhere years away, happy, with children, and with different worries.  It’s a vivid daydream. She sits there fabricating it, feeling it for what it is, and feeling too, that nothing will change: the Martin she sees in the daydream is nothing like the man she lives with. She thinks of Milly Harmon, pregnant and talking about waiting to be surprised by love.”

            from the “The Fireman’s Wife” by Richard Bausch

Here’s another example where we have a strong third person limited omniscient narrator.  We know who the main character will be –the young woman (Claire) but we are watching her along with the narrator.  Here, just to complicate things, the narrator is not limited to Claire completely. The narrator claims more omniscience than the previous one by describing the main character not by her name in the beginning, which would put the narrator closer to her, but from the more distanced “young woman.” Not only that, the narrator roams into the heads of the men on the plane near Claire.  But the focus is still Claire; the story will be her experience and hers alone.  Only gradually does the narrator move in closer to Claire and her feelings. But having claimed it, this narrator always retains a great degree of control, distance, and omniscience in telling this story. She is not limited by any means to a “scenic treatment.”  In many ways, this allows her to go deeper than mere showing (though that is effective in certain stories also; think Hemingway).  Notice how different this story opening is from the one by Valerie Miner, where there is no narrator.  Remember, there are all kinds of variations and degrees of narrator involvement, omniscience, and distance depending on the story.

“Suddenly, on a routine flight between Atlanta and Washington, D.C., a young woman who has been staring intently out of her window bursts into violent tears.  No turbulence can have upset her — the air is clear and blue and calm — but in an instant her eyes clench shut, her hands fly up to cover her face and her shoulders convulse in spasms.

            She is seated near the front of the plane and the seat next to hers has not been taken.  No one is aware of this outburst but the two men across the aisle from her.  Because she is good-looking, in a dark, rather stylist way, these men have been observing her since she got on the plane with them in Atlanta; they like the somewhat old-fashioned smooth way her hair is knotted, although, good old Southern boys at heart, they are not so sure about the look on her face, what they could see of it, before she began to cry: wide-eyed and serious, she hardly smiled.  One of those women too smart for their own good, they think.”

The second section of the story begins, “The young woman, Claire Williston, who is not on drugs, or drunk, has been deeply mortified by those tears, which came on her like a fit, a seizure.  Generally she is a disciplined person; she behaves well, even under emotional stress.  She does not make scenes, does not cry in public, and rarely cries alone.  Maudlin, she is censoriously thinking, and How could I do this to myself.  How could I take a flight that would go right over Hilton?

            Vague about the specifics of geography, she had simply not realized what any map could have told her: flying from Atlanta to Washington of course you go right over Hilton, the small mid-Southern town where Claire was born and lived for the years until she went away to school up North.  To which, except for one fatal summer and her father’s funeral, she has not been back for years, and where, as she sees it, she cannot ever now go back.  But here she is, directly overhead.”

At the end of the story, we are right “in” Claire.

“However, instead of finally getting down to work on the serious article that is her assignment, in a dreamlike way Claire sits back in her chair, and she begins, rather, to recall the particularities of her trip.  She remembers certain accents, heard on streets, in restaurants, in Atlanta and Charleston, Savannah and New Orleans — and gestures observed, both unique and indigenous to that region.  And she sees again the colors of earth and leaves which, at certain times of the year, in a certain place, are absolutely unmistakable.”   

            from “An Unscheduled Stop” by Alice Adams

Hopefully you have seen how we can start at one end of the spectrum of third person stories where there is almost no narrator to a very dominant omniscient narrator — even though the story is still third person limited (but with a little true omniscience in the opening).   This last story still has only one main character, and it is her story we will follow.  But the narrator takes great liberty in being able to tell us a lot about the character – not everything but everything we need to know. 

Begin to notice the use of or lack of a narrator in stories you read. 

None of this is meant to confuse you.  No way is “best.”  Point of view depends on the story you want to tell — how you “see” the material, what you want to do with it, what your idea or point is.  My point is that you have choices, options, technical possibilities.  Don’t be “limited” yourself by thinking there is only one way to tell a story — the “show” way of everything having to be scenic. Many beginnings writers fall into this trap. Don’t be afraid to use a narrator who can “tell” the story.  Experiment with openings.  Strike out boldly with a very omniscient narrator a la Alice Adams, or a more limited omniscient one a la Margaret Edwards.  You’ll be surprised what a difference the use of a narrator can make sometimes. 

My attempt to practice the use of a narrator in “Numerology,” the first story we looked at here:

“Ryan Calloway had been in Paris for five months when he received the news that his parents were getting a divorce.  Ryan was officially registered as a student in a study-abroad program — his parents’ latest attempt to get him to actually get his degree — but as soon as he learned about his parents, he more or less dropped out and began walking around the town.  He was not terribly ambitious to begin with, but it wasn’t just that.  It was that he was angry at his folks, and losing himself in this particular way felt like as good a form of punishment as any.”

I took this material from later in the story, compressed and began with it – just to see the difference in the two ways of opening the story: scenic vs. more expositorially, via a narrator.