• Home
  • Greek Mythology
  • Pakistani Literature
    • Poetry
      • Anniversary by Daud Kamal
  • History
    • The Age of Chaucer
    • Renaissance Literature
    • Age of Shakespeare
    • The Age of Johnson
    • Development of Novel
    • Elizabethan Age
    • Restoration Period
    • The Age of Johnson
    • The Age of Milton
    • Victorian Age
  • Explore
    • Interview Skills
    • Literature
      • Short Stories
      • One Act Play
      • Plays
        • Macbeth
        • Antigone
    • Elizabethan Literature
      • Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe
    • Movements
      • Absurdism
      • Aestheticism
      • Existentialism
      • Expressionism
      • Gothic Literature
      • Humanism
      • Magical Realism
      • Naturalism
      • Nihilism
      • Realism
      • Surrealism
    • Basics of Literature
    • Prose Works
      • Waiting for Godot
      • To the Lighthouse
      • Jazz by Toni Morrison
      • The Crucible by Arthur Miller
      • Look Back in Anger by John Osborne
      • A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen
      • A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
    • World Literature
      • Albert Camus
        • The Stranger
      • Jean Paul Sartre
        • The Wall
      • Jorge Luis Borges
      • Friedrich Nietzsche
      • Franz Kafka
        • In the Penal Colony by Kafka
        • The Judgment by Kafka
        • A Dream by Kafka
        • The Warden of the Tomb
        • The Castle
      • The Madman by Kahlil Gibran
      • Notes from the Underground
    • Poetry
      • Ted Hughes
      • Sylvia Plath
      • W.H. Auden
      • W.B. Yeats
      • Adrienne Rich
      • Paradise Lost
      • William Wordsworth
    • Classical Criticism
      • Literary Criticism | Functions of Criticism | Principles of Criticism
      • An Apology for Poetry
      • Mathew Arnold
      • Poetics by Aristotle
      • T.S. Eliot
    • Literary Theory
      • Defamiliarization
      • Formalism
      • New Criticism
      • The Death of Author
      • Marxism
    • Summaries
  • About
    • About us
    • Terms and Conditions
    • Privacy Policy
    • Contact
What's Hot

Critical appreciation of “Lines Written in Early Spring”

August 10, 2022

Analysis of “Macbeth”

August 3, 2022

P.B Shelley as a Romantic Poet

July 27, 2022
Facebook Twitter Instagram
  • Help Study
  • History Rewind
Facebook Twitter Instagram
Literature Times
  • Home
  • Greek Mythology
  • Pakistani Literature
    • Poetry
      • Anniversary by Daud Kamal
  • History
    • The Age of Chaucer
    • Renaissance Literature
    • Age of Shakespeare
    • The Age of Johnson
    • Development of Novel
    • Elizabethan Age
    • Restoration Period
    • The Age of Johnson
    • The Age of Milton
    • Victorian Age
  • Explore
    • Interview Skills
    • Literature
      • Short Stories
      • One Act Play
      • Plays
        • Macbeth
        • Antigone
    • Elizabethan Literature
      • Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe
    • Movements
      • Absurdism
      • Aestheticism
      • Existentialism
      • Expressionism
      • Gothic Literature
      • Humanism
      • Magical Realism
      • Naturalism
      • Nihilism
      • Realism
      • Surrealism
    • Basics of Literature
    • Prose Works
      • Waiting for Godot
      • To the Lighthouse
      • Jazz by Toni Morrison
      • The Crucible by Arthur Miller
      • Look Back in Anger by John Osborne
      • A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen
      • A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
    • World Literature
      • Albert Camus
        • The Stranger
      • Jean Paul Sartre
        • The Wall
      • Jorge Luis Borges
      • Friedrich Nietzsche
      • Franz Kafka
        • In the Penal Colony by Kafka
        • The Judgment by Kafka
        • A Dream by Kafka
        • The Warden of the Tomb
        • The Castle
      • The Madman by Kahlil Gibran
      • Notes from the Underground
    • Poetry
      • Ted Hughes
      • Sylvia Plath
      • W.H. Auden
      • W.B. Yeats
      • Adrienne Rich
      • Paradise Lost
      • William Wordsworth
    • Classical Criticism
      • Literary Criticism | Functions of Criticism | Principles of Criticism
      • An Apology for Poetry
      • Mathew Arnold
      • Poetics by Aristotle
      • T.S. Eliot
    • Literary Theory
      • Defamiliarization
      • Formalism
      • New Criticism
      • The Death of Author
      • Marxism
    • Summaries
  • About
    • About us
    • Terms and Conditions
    • Privacy Policy
    • Contact
Literature Times
Home»Development of Novel»How Different Narrative Techniques are Used in Novels?
How-Different-Narrative-Techniques-are-Used-in-Novels_-1
Development of Novel

How Different Narrative Techniques are Used in Novels?

ShaheerBy ShaheerApril 13, 2021Updated:January 3, 2022No Comments6 Mins Read
Share
Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Email

The narrative is a story that can be conveyed through pictures, songs, poetry, speech, fiction, and non-fiction. When in the writing mode, its telling is relegated to a particular person; it becomes a technique used by that person. The consigned person is the narrator, and his perspective serves as a prism through which ideas are transmitted to the readers.

There are different types of narration, i.e., different ways of presenting a story. Traditionally, a broad division is made between third-person and first-person narratives. The third-person narrative is further divided into subclasses according to the degree and kind of freedom or limitation the author assumes in getting the story across. In a third-person narrative, the narrator is someone outside the story proper who refers to all the characters in the story by name, or as “he,” “she,” “they.” In a first-person narrative, the narrator speaks as “I” and is himself to a greater or lesser degree a participant in the story.

Narrative Techniques in Novels

Third-Person Point-of-View

Omniscient Narrator:

The narrator knows everything about the agents, actions, and events. He also knows the characters’ thoughts, feelings, and motives. He is free to move at will in time and place, to shift from character to character, and to report (or conceal) their speech, doings, and states of consciousness.

The intrusive narrator reports and comments on and evaluates the actions and motives of the characters. He sometimes expresses personal views about human life in general. The omniscient narrator’s descriptions and judgments serve to establish the facts and values within the fictional world. Many of the greatest novelists, including Fielding, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Leo Tolstoy, have written in this fashion. On the other hand, the omniscient narrator may choose to be unintrusive.

Limited Point-of-View

The narrator tells the story in the third person, but tells only what is experienced, thought, and felt by a single character within the story. Henry James described such a selected character as his “focus,” or “mirror,” or “center of consciousness.” In several of James’s later works, all the events and actions are represented as they unfold through the particular perceptions and awareness of one of his characters; for example, Strether in The Ambassadors (1903) or Maisie in What Maisie Knew (1897). A short and artfully sustained example of this limited narration is Katherine Mansfield’s story “Bliss” (1920).

In stream-of-consciousness narration, we are presented with outer observations only as they impinge on the continuous current of thought, memory, feelings, and associations. This type of “objective narration” is widely used by Henry James, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and others.

Read About: Elements of Novel in English Literature

First-Person Point-of-View

This mode limits the narrative’s matter to what the first-person narrator knows, experiences, infers or can find out by talking to other characters. The first-person narrator can be a fortuitous witness and auditor of the matters he relates (Marlow in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness). He can be a minor participant in the story (Ishmael in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Nick in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby). Or he can be the central character in the story (Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye).

Many of the techniques the novel developed over the past 100 years can be understood as the result of competition with the new mass media: film, comics, and the World Wide Web. Shot and sequence, focus, and perspective have moved from film editing to literary composition. Experimental 20th-century fiction is, at the same time, influenced by literary theory. Literary theory, arising in the 20th century, questioned vital factors that had been matters of agreement in 19th-century literary criticism: the author wrote the text, he was influenced by his period, by an intellectual climate the nation provided, and by his personality. The literary theorists argued that the literary criticism of the 19th century had not indeed seen the text. It had concentrated on the author, his/her period, the culture that surrounded him/her, his/her psyche – factors outside the text that had allegedly shaped it. The methods of analysis changed with each of these schools. All assumed that the text had its purpose, independent of all authorial intentions and period backgrounds.

The “stream of consciousness” replaced the authorial voice. The characters endowed with these new voices had no firm ground from which to narrate. Their audiences had to re-create what was purposefully broken. One of the aims was to represent the reality of thoughts, sensations, and conflicting perspectives. William Faulkner was mainly concerned with recreating real life.

Postmodern authors subverted the serious debate with playfulness. The new theorists claim that art could never be original. It always played with existing materials, that language recalled itself had been an accepted truth in the world of trivial literature. A postmodernist could reread trivial literature as the essential cultural production. The creative avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s “closed the gap” and widespread recycled knowledge, conspiracy theories, comics, and films to recombine these materials in what was to become the art of entirely new qualities.

Literary critics and theorists become the privileged first readers that the new texts need to unfold. James Joyce is said to have said this about the reception he designed for his Ulysses (1922): “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.”

While the postmodern movement has been criticized at times as theoretical if not escapist, it successfully unfolded itself in several films of the 1990s and 2000s: Pulp Fiction (1994), Memento (2000), and The Matrix (1999–2003) can be read as new textual constructs designed to prove that we are surrounded by virtual realities and by realities alone we construct out of circulating fragments, of images, concepts, a language of cultural materials the new filmmakers explore.

Thoughts? Share in the comment section!

For free Udemy courses visit this site: Free Udemy Courses

And yes! if you need premium accounts at cheapest rate inbox me on my Facebook page at: Premium Palace

Subscribe my YouTube channel at: The Stream Post

Follow on Facebook page of Literature Times at: Literature Times on Facebook

narrative coaching techniques narrative techniques narrative techniques definition narrative techniques examples narrative techniques in literature pdf narrative techniques in pride and prejudice narrative techniques list narrative techniques pdf narrative techniques ppt narrative voice techniques narrative writing techniques pdf what are different types of narrative techniques what are narrative techniques what are some examples of indirect characterization what are some narrative techniques what are the different narrative techniques what are the different types of narrative techniques what are the five methods of indirect characterization
Share. Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn Tumblr Email
Shaheer
  • Website

Related Posts

Literature as Expression of Thoughts, Society and Life

April 8, 2022

Art for Life’s Sake and Moral Purpose of Literature

March 30, 2022

Difference between Romanticism and Classicism

March 28, 2022

What are the Similarities and Differences Between Poetry and Drama?

February 17, 2022
Add A Comment

Leave A Reply Cancel Reply

Top Articles

Explain Arnold’s Concept of “Poetry as Criticism of Life”

June 23, 2021

Waiting for Godot and Significance of Title

June 24, 2020

Analysis of The Death of Author by Roland Barthes

April 6, 2021
Advertisement
About

Literature Times provides literary analysis, articles and essays about different topics specifically focused on English Literature

Top Insights

Critical appreciation of “Lines Written in Early Spring”

August 10, 2022

Analysis of “Macbeth”

August 3, 2022

P.B Shelley as a Romantic Poet

July 27, 2022
  • Homepage
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms and Conditions
© 2022 Literature Times | Designed by Shaheer

Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.