Monthly Archives: March 2021

Mar 12 2021
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literary theory, novel writing, POV, writing

Narratology: Focalization or Point of View

Narratology is a branch of literary theory that studies narrative structure and function. Fiction narratives are communicated through a voice that belongs to the narrator.

FocalizationThe narrator is the fictitious character that verbally transmits the events of the narrative. The narrator can share events from a position outside the story, using the omniscient point of view (POV) of “someone who, for some reason, knows everything about the story” (Freiburg).

More likely, narrators will employ the limited point of view of one or more characters in the story. If so, they’re unable to know anything they cannot see, hear, or otherwise perceive.

Focalization and Focalizers

Choosing a perspective is separate from determining whether the narrator is a character in the story. The term focalization distinguishes between narrative voice—Who speaks?—and perspective—Who sees or perceives? Narration is what is told; focalization is what is perceived (Scott).

There are two kinds of focalizers:

  • An external focalizer is a POV character external to the story. An external focalizer is called a narrator-focalizer because perception belongs to the narrator.
  • An internal focalizer‘s perception belongs to a character within the story. Internal focalizers are also called character-focalizers.

If you’re using an external focalizer as a heterodiegetic narrator, you may tell your story in omniscient point of view. If you employ a homodiegetic or autodiegetic narrator as an internal focalizer, you may choose from second person, distant third, intimate third, or first person POV.

You’re not stuck with only one focalization or POV in your story. You can change focalizers to introduce other POVs. For example, you may have multiple first or third character-narrators, or mix and match POVs from scene to scene or chapter to chapter.

Unreliable Narrators

Not all narrators are reliable. As writer, you may lead readers to distrust what your narrator says. “Some narrators tell deliberate lies or omit crucial information” (Freiburg). One such narrator is Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.

Villains may deliberately lead readers down the wrong trail. Other characters, however, may be unable to provide objective information because they’re “naive, insane, unaware, or mistaken” (Scott).

A given narrator’s unreliability can be obvious or hidden, providing only faint hints that something’s wrong.

In the next installment, we’ll dig into the meat of narrative modes.

Source: https://www2.anglistik.uni-freiburg.de/intranet/englishbasics/NarrativeSituation01.htm
Further reading: https://blog.bookbaby.com/2016/03/focalization-smart-writers-never-ignore-it/ by Rose Scott.

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Mar 09 2021
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literary theory, novel writing, POV, writing

Narratology: Understanding Narration

Narratology is a branch of literary theory that studies narrative structure and function. Fiction is one form of narrative prose, meaning it’s an account of events told by someone. It’s always communicated through a “voice,” and that voice belongs to the narrator.

To understand narrative voice, you must identify who speaks—who tells the story. This is always the narrator, a fictitious character who has a purpose in telling the tale.

Types of Narrators

Narrators are often a character in the story they’re telling. These types of narrators are called homodiegetic narrators. (Diegetic means within a setting or story world.) If the homodiegetic narrator is also the protagonist of the story, he or she is called an autodiegetic narrator.

For example, Nick Carraway is the narrator of as well as a character in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. But he’s not the protagonist of the novel; Jay Gatsby is. This makes Carraway a homodiegetic narrator but not an autodiegetic one. Katniss Everdeen, however, is both the narrator and protagonist of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games; she’s an autodiegetic narrator.

A narrator who is not a character in the story but who knows everything and tells the story from an omniscient point of view is called a heterodiegetic narrator. Heterodiegetic narrators were popular in Victorian literature but are out of vogue today.

It isn’t crucial that you remember this jargon so long as you understand the concepts.

It’s also important to realize that the narrator is not the same as you, the author. Narrators, whether they’re story people or not, are fictive characters who can hold viewpoints and opinions that you don’t share. For example, female authors can create male narrators. And you can write multiple stories each with different narrators who have opposite worldviews. Remember: the narrator in fiction is a made-up character.

Narrators are characters who relay the story to a fictive reader, a narratee. A specific addressee is rarely named in stories. However, in my psychological thriller The Bedwetter: Journal of a Budding Psychopath, protagonist Russell Pisarek ends up writing his journal for another character in the story world.

Levels of Narrative Communication

Three levels comprise a fiction narrative, presented here from the inside out:

  1. A character addresses another character in the story world narrative. For example, Russell Pisarek argues with his sister Becky.
  2. This exchange, along with description of character actions and setting, is told by a narrator who addresses an imaginary reader (the narratee). In The Bedwetter, Russell writes in his journal about his encounters and thoughts for another character in the book.
  3. The text is composed by a real author (yours truly) and is read by an actual reader (hopefully, you).

These three levels are nested, as depicted in the following diagram:

Levels of Narrative Communication

Next installment, we’ll learn more about focalization: how narrators intersect with point of view.

Source: https://www2.anglistik.uni-freiburg.de/intranet/englishbasics/NarrativeSituation01.htm

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