literature

Narration, Grammar of. The analysis of special grammatical usages that are characteristic of fictional narratives. The systematic study of the grammar of narration was begun by Käte Hamburger in The Logic of Literature (1957, trans. 1973). One focus of such analysis is the special play of deictics—that is, of words such as "now," "then," "here," "there," "today," "last month," personal pronouns and certain tenses of verbs—whose reference depends on the particular speaker and his or her position in place and time. In many narratives, usually in a way not explicitly noted by the reader, the references of such terms constantly shift or merge, as the narration moves from the narrator, by whom the events are told in the past tense (e.g., then and there), to a character in the narration, for whom the action is present (e.g., here and now). Another notable grammatical usage has been called free indirect discourse (equivalent to the French "style indirect libre"), or "represented speech and thought." These terms refer to the way, in many narratives, that the reports of what a character says and thinks shift in pronouns, adverbs, tense, and grammatical mode, as we move—or sometimes hover—between the direct narrated reproductions of these events as they occur to the character and the indirect representation of such events by the narrator. Thus, a direct representation, "He thought, Ί will see her home now, and may then stop at my mother's/" might shift, in an "indirect representation," to "He thought that he would see her home and then maybe stop at his mother's." In a "free indirect representation" the sentence might change to "He would see her home then, and might afterward stop at his mother's." Refer to narrative and nanatology, and see Roy Pascal, The Dual Voice: Free Indirect Speech and Its Functioning in the Nineteenth-Century European (1977); Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (1978); Ann Banfield, Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction (1982). NARRATIVE AND NARRATOLOGY 173 Narrative and Narratology. A narrative is a story, whether told in prose or verse, involving events, characters, and what the characters say and do. Some literary forms such as the novel and short story in prose, and the epic and romance in verse, are explicit narratives that are told by a narrator. In drama, the narrative is not told, but evolves by means of the direct presentation on stage of the actions and speeches of the characters. It should be noted that there is an implicit narrative element even in many lyric poems. In William Wordsworth's "The Solitary Reaper," for example, we infer from what the lyric speaker says that, coming unexpectedly in the Scottish Highlands upon a girl reaping and singing, he stops, attends, meditates, and then continues his climb up the hill. Narratology denotes recent concerns with the general theory and practice of narrative in all literary forms. It deals especially with types of narrators, the identification of structural elements and their diverse modes of combination, recurrent narrative devices, and the analysis of the kinds of discourse by which a narrative gets told, as well as with the narratee—that is, the explicit or implied person or audience to whom the narrator addresses the narrative. Current narratological theory picks up and elaborates upon many topics in traditional treatments of fictional narratives, from Aristotle's Poetics in the fourth century B.C. to Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961); current theory, however, applies to such topics concepts and analytic procedures which derive from recent developments in Russian formalism and especially in French structuralism. Narcologists, accordingly, do not treat a narrative in the traditional way, as a fictional representation of life, but as a systematic formal construction. A primary interest of structural narratologists is in the way that narrative discourse fashions a story—the mere sequence of events in time—into the organized and meaningful structure of a literary plot. (The Russian formalists had made a parallel distinction between the fabula—the elemental materials of a story—and the syuzhet, the concrete representation used to convey the story.) The general undertaking is to determine the rules, or codes of composition, that are manifested by the diverse forms of plot, and also to formulate the "grammar" of narrative in terms of structures and narrative formulae that recur in many stories, whatever the differences in the narrated subject matters. In Narrative Discourse (1980), followed by Figures of Literary Discourse (1982), the French structuralist critic Gérard Genette presented influential analyses of the complex interrelations between a story and the types of discourse in which the story is narrated, and greatly subtilized the treatment of point of view in narrative fiction. Hayden White is a historian who sets out to demonstrate that the narratives written by historians are not simple representations of a sequence of facts, nor the revelation of a design inherent in events. Instead, White analyzes historical narratives as shaped by the imposition on events of cultural patterns similar to the narratological, archetypal, and other structural concepts that had been applied in the criticism of literature; see his Metahistory (1973) and The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (1987). The philosopher W B. Gallie has written an influential book on the kind of explanation and understanding that, in the writing of history, is 1 7 4 NEGATIVE CAPABILITY · NEOCLASSIC AND ROMANTIC achieved by narration rather than by propositional statements and logical arguments; see W. B. Gallie, Philosophy and the Historical Understanding (1964); also Arthur C. Danto, Nanation and Knowledge (1985). A book which did much to inaugurate modern narratology was The Morphology of the Folktale by the Russian formalist Vladimir Propp (trans., 1970). For later developments in narrative theory see, in addition to Genette (above), Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose (trans., 1977); Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Nanative Structure in Fiction and Film (1978); Robert Alters, Art of Biblical Nanative (1981); Wallace Martin, Recent Theories of Nanative (1986); Gerald Prince, A Dictionary ofNanatology (1987); Paul Ricoeur, Time and Nanative (3 vols., 1984-88); and Mieke Bal, Nanatology: Introduction to the Theory of Nanative (rev. ed., 1997). In recent years, some cognitive psychologists and literary and cultural theorists have proposed that narrative, or the telling of diverse "stories" about how one thing leads to another, is the basic means by which we make sense of the world, provide meaning to our experiences, and organize our lives. See Jerome Bruner, Acts of Meaning (1990), and Actual Worlds, Possible Minds (1986); and Mark Turner, The Literary Mind (1996). For recent narratological contributions to older analyses of how a story gets told, see point of view. Point of View signifies the way a story gets told—the mode (or modes) established by an author by means of which the reader is presented with the characters, dialogue, actions, setting, and events which constitute the nanative in a work of fiction. The question of point of view has always been a practical concern of the novelist, and there have been scattered observations on the matter in critical writings since the emergence of the modern novel in the eighteenth century. Henry James' prefaces to his various novels, however— collected as The Art of the Novel in 1934—and Percy Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction (1926), which codified and expanded upon James' comments, made point of view one of the most prominent and persistent concerns in modern treatments of the art of prose fiction. Authors have developed many different ways to present a story, and many single works exhibit a diversity of methods. The simplified classification below, however, is widely recognized and can serve as a preliminary frame of reference for analyzing traditional types of narration and for determining the predominant type in mixed narrative modes. It deals first with by far the most widely used modes, first-person and third-person narration. It establishes a broad distinction between these two modes, then divides thirdperson narratives into subclasses according to the degree and kind of freedom or limitation which the author assumes in getting the story across to the reader. It then goes on to deal briefly with the rarely used mode of secondperson narration. 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." Thus Jane Austen's Emma begins: "Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her." In a first-person narrative, the narrator speaks as "I," and is to a greater or lesser degree a participant in the story. J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951) begins: "If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll really want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap. . . ." POINT OF VIEW I Third-person points of view (1) The omniscient point of view. This is a common term for the many and varied works of fiction written in accord with the convention that the narrator knows everything that needs to be known about the agents, actions, and events, and has privileged access to the characters' thoughts, feelings, and motives; also that the narrator 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. Within this mode, the intrusive narrator is one who not only reports, but also comments on and evaluates the actions and motives of the characters, and sometimes expresses personal views about human life in general. Most works are written according to the convention that the omniscient narrator's reports and judgments are to be taken as authoritative by the reader, and so serve to establish what counts as the true facts and values within the fictional world. This is the fashion in which many of the greatest novelists have written, including Fielding, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Leo Tolstoy. (In Fielding's Tom Jones and Tolstoy's War and Peace, 1863-69, the intrusive narrator goes so far as to interpolate commentary, or short essays suggested by the subject matter of the novels.) On the other hand, the omniscient narrator may choose to be unintrusive (alternative terms are impersonal or objective). Flaubert in Madame Bovary (1857), for example, for the most part describes, reports, or "shows" the action in dramatic scenes without introducing his own comments or judgments. More radical instances of the unintrusive narrator, who gives up even the privilege of access to inner feelings and motives, are to be found in a number of Ernest Hemingway's short stories; for example, "The Killers," and "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." (See showing and telling, under character.) For an extreme use impersonal representation, see the comment on Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy, under novel. Gérard Genette subtilized in various ways the analysis of thirdperson point of view. For example, he distinguishes between focus of narration (who tells the story) and focus of character (who perceives what is told us in any part of the story). In Henry James' What Maisie Knew, for example, the focus of narration is an adult who tells the story, but his focus is on events as they are perceived and interpreted by the character Maisie, a child. Both the focus of narration and the focus of character (that is, of perception) in a single story may shift rapidly from the narrator to a character in the story, and from one character to another. In To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf shifts the focus of character to each in turn of the principal participants in the story; and Hemingway's short story, "The Short Happy Life of POINT OF VIEW 233 Francis Macomber," is a third-person narrative in which the focus of perception is, in various passages, the narrator, the hunter Wilson, Mrs. Macomber, Mr. Macomber, and even, briefly, the hunted lion. See Gérard Genette, Nanatìve Discourse: An Essay in Method (1972, trans. 1980). (2) The limited point of view. The narrator tells the story in the third person, but stays inside the confines of what is perceived, thought, remembered and felt by a single character (or at most by very few characters) within the story. Henry James, who refined this narrative mode, described such a selected character as his "focus," or "mirror," or "center of consciousness." In a number of James' later works all the events and actions are represented as they unfold before, and filter to the reader through, the particular perceptions, awareness, and responses of only one character; for example, Strether in The Ambassadors (1903). A short and artfully sustained example of this limited narration is Katherine Mansfield's story "Bliss" (1920). Later writers developed this technique into stream-of-consciousness narration, in which we are presented with outer observations only as they impinge on the continuous current of thought, memory, feelings, and associations which constitute a particular observer's total awareness. The limitation of point of view represented both by James' "center of consciousness" narration and by the "stream-of-consciousness" narration sometimes used by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and others, is often said to exemplify the "self-effacing author," or "objective narration," more effectively than does the use of an unintrusive but omniscient narrator. In the latter instance, it is said, the reader remains aware that someone, or some outside voice, is telling us about what is going on; the alternative mode, in which the point of view is limited to the consciousness of a character within the story itself, gives readers the illusion of experiencing events that evolve before their own eyes. For a revealing analysis, however, of the way even an author who restricts the narrative center of consciousness to a single character nonetheless communicates authorial judgments on people and events, and also controls the judgments evoked from the reader, see Ian Watt, "The First Paragraph of The Ambassadors; An Explication," reprinted in James, The Ambassadors, éd. S. P. Rosenbaum (1964). See also persona, tone, and voice. II First-person points of view This mode, insofar as it is consistently carried out, limits the matter of the narrative to what the first-person narrator knows, experiences, infers, or can find out by talking to other characters. We distinguish between the narrative "I" who is only a fortuitous witness and auditor of the matters he relates (Marlow in Heart of Darkness and other works by Joseph Conrad); or who is a participant, but only a minor or 234 POINT OF VIEW peripheral one, in the story (Ishmael in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, Nick in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby); or who is himself or herself the central character in the story (Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Villette, Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye). Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man manifests a complex narrative mode in which the protagonist is the first-person narrator, whose focus of character is on the perceptions of a third party—white America—to whose eyes the protagonist, because he is black, is "invisible." For a special type of first-person narrative, see epistolary novel. Ill Second-person points of view In this mode the story gets told solely, or at least primarily, as an address by the narrator to someone he calls by the second-person pronoun "you." This form of narration occurred in occasional passages of traditional fiction, but has been exploited in a sustained way only during the latter part of the twentieth century and then only rarely; the effect is of a virtuoso performance. The French novelist Michel Butor, in La Modification (1957, trans, as Second Thoughts, 1981), the Italian novelist Italo Calvino in If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (trans, 1981), and the American novelist Jay Mclnerney in Bright Lights, Big City (1984), all tell their story with "you" as the nanatee. Mclnerney's Bright Lights, Big City, for example, begins: 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, though the details are fuzzy. You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge. This second person may turn out to be a specific fictional character, or the reader of the story, or even the narrator himself or herself, or not clearly or consistently the one or the other; and the story may unfold by shifting between telling the narratee what he or she is now doing, has done in the past, or will or is commanded to do in the future. Italo Calvino uses the form to achieve a complex and comic form of involuted fiction, by involving "you," the reader, in the fabrication of the narrative itself. His novel opens: You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate .. . Best to close the door, the TV is on in the next room. Tell the others right away, "No, I don't want to watch TV!" . . . Or if you prefer, don't say anything; just hope they'll leave you alone. Refer to Brian Richardson; "The Poetics and Politics of Second-Person Narrative," Genre 24 (1991); Monika Fludernick, "Second-Person Narrative as a Test Case for Narratology," Style 28 (1994); and "Second-Person Narrative: A Bibliography," Style (1994); Bruce Morrissette, "Narrative 'You' in Contemporary POINT OF VIEW 235 Literature/' Comparative Literature Studies 2 (1965). Sean Matthew Andrews analyzes tactics of second-person narrative in short stories by Lorrie Moore, Frederick Barthelme, and Reynold Price in A Disquisition on Second Person Narrative, Senior Honors Thesis in English at the Pennsylvania State University, 1996. Two other frequently discussed narrative tactics are relevant to a consideration of points of view: The self-conscious narrator shatters any illusion that he or she is telling something that has actually happened by revealing to the reader that the narration is a work of fictional art, or by flaunting the discrepancies between its patent fictionality and the reality it seems to represent. This can be done either seriously (Henry Fielding's narrator in Tom ¡ones and Marcel in Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, 1913-27) or for primarily comic purposes (Tristram in Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, 1759-67, and the narrator of Lord Byron's versified Don Juan, 1819-24), or for purposes which are both serious and comic (Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, 1833-34). See Robert Alter, Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre (1975), and refer to romantic irony. One variety of self-conscious narrative exploited in recent prose fiction is called the self-reflexive novel, or the involuted novel, which incorporates into its narration reference to the process of composing the fictional story itself. An early modern version, André Gide's The Counterfeiters (1926), is also one of the most intricate. As Harry Levin summarized its self-involution: it is "the diary of a novelist who is writing a novel [to be called The Counterfeiters] about a novelist who is keeping a diary about the novel he is writing"; the nest of Chinese boxes was further multiplied by Gide's publication, also in 1926, of his own Journal of The Counterfeiters, kept while he was composing the novel. Vladimir Nabokov is an ingenious exploiter of involuted fiction; for example, in Pale Fire (1962). See metaftction in the entry novel. We ordinarily accept what a narrator tells us as authoritative. The fallible or unreliable narrator, on the other hand, is one whose perception, interpretation, and evaluation of the matters he or she narrates do not coincide with the opinions and norms implied by the author, which the author expects the alert reader to share. (See the commentary on reliable and unreliable narrators in Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 1961.) Henry James made repeated use of the narrator whose excessive innocence, or oversophistication, or moral obtuseness, makes him a flawed and distorting "center of consciousness" in the work; the result is an elaborate structure of ironies. (See irony.) Examples of James' use of a fallible narrator are his short stories "The Aspern Papers" and "The Liar." The Sacred Fount and The Turn of the Screw are works by James in which, according to some critics, the clues for correcting the views of the fallible narrator are inadequate, so that what we are meant to take as factual within the story, and the evaluations intended by the author, remain problematic. See, for example, the remarkably diverse critical interpretations collected in A Casebook on Henry James' "The Turn of the Saew," ed. Gerald Willen (1960), and in The Turn of the Screw, ed. Robert Kimbrough (1966). The critic 2 3 6 POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES Tzvetan Todorov, on the other hand, has classified The Turn of the Saew as an instance of fantastic literature, which he defines as deliberately designed by the author to leave the reader in a state of uncertainty whether the events are to be explained by reference to natural causes (as hallucinations caused by the protagonist's repressed sexuality) or to supernatural causes. See Todorov's The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (trans. Richard Howard, 1973); also Eric S. Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature (1976). Drastic experimentation in recent prose fiction has complicated in many ways traditional renderings of point of view, not only in second-person, but also in first- and third-person narratives; see fiction and persona, tone, and voice. On point of view, in addition to the writings mentioned above, refer to Norman Friedman, "Point of View in Fiction," PMLA 70 (1955); Leon Edel, The Modern Psychological Novel (rev., 1964), chapters 3-4; Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961); Franz Stanzel, A Theory of Nanative (1979, trans. 1984); Susan Lanser, The Narrative Act: Point of View in Fiction (1981); Wallace Martin, Recent Theories of Nanative (1986). narratee A term invented by Gerald Prince to denote the person to whom a narrator addressesh is discourse.T he n^rratee is not to be confused with the reader, who may be the 'virtual reader' (i.e. the kind of reader the narrator has in mind while composing the discourse), or the 'ideal reader' (i.e. the reader who understands everything the writer/narrator is saying and doing). See also rMpLrED nreoen/ecruAl READER; READER-RESPONSE THEORY. narrator Plato and Aristotle distinguished three basic kinds of narrator: (a) the speaker or poet (or any kind of writer) who uses his own voice; (b) one who assumes the voice of another person or persons, and speaks in a voice not his own; (c) one who uses a mixture of his own voice and that of others. Out of the thousands of examples available to illustrate the three voices the following will serve: In his poem The Statue the poet John Berryman speaks throughout in his own voice. In Tbe Prisoner of Cbillon,Byron assumes the voice of Frangois de Bonnivard who was imprisoned in the castle of Chillon in the r6th c. A good example of the combination of three voices can be found in Paradise losr. Milton begins in his own voice in the first person to invoke the 'Heavenly Muse'. In line 34, Book I, the impression is that the Muse (that is the Holy Spirit) responds to Milton's formal invocation (q.o.) thus beginning the main narrative. \(rhen Satan first speaks (line Sa) the third voice is introduced. Thereafter each different character has his own voice, though all, as it were, are Milton's. At the beginning of Book III Milton draws breath and uses his 'own'voice agarn. So anyone telling a story may begin, as narrator, by using his own voice; then introduce a narrator who tells the story - in which there are characters who, in turn, have their own voices and who, in their turn, of course, may narrate. Potentially the progression (or regression) is infinite. Many novelists have employed this technique, one of the most adept being Joseph Conrad. t3t narrator T. S. Eliot also makes an important disdnction in his essay The Three Voices of Poetry (rplt)r 'The first voice is the voice of the poet talking to himself - or to nobody. The second is the voice of the poet addressing an audience, whether large or small. The third is the voice of the poet when he attempts to create a dramatic character speaking in versel when he is sayingr not what he would say in his own person, but only what he can say within the limits of one imaginary character addressing another imaginary character.' rUflhatis known as the'self-conscious narrator'is one who employs techniques related to the theories of foregrounding and defamiliariz tion (qq.o.).By dint of 'baring the device' (or devices) the writer reveals to and reminds the reader that the narration is a work of fiction while at the same time pointing up or exposing the discrepancies between the fiction and the reality which it purports or seems to represent. Tristram in Sterne's Tristram Shandy Q76v6) is a notable instance. Others are Marcel in Proust's A k rechercbe d,n temPs perdu (t9r3-27) and the narrator in Byron's Don Juan (r819-24). The method of using the self-conscious narrator lends itself to sophisticated and complex refinements in what is known as the 'reflexive novel' (q.o.) or the 'involuted novel'. An outstanding example of this is Andr6 Gide's Les Faux-monrutyears (1926), in which he uses intricate narrative tactics. This book is the diary of a novelist who is writing a novel - which is going to have the title les Faux-monnzlyears ('The Counterfeiters') - about a novelist who is keeping a diery about the novel he is actually writing. Gide compounded this ingenuity by keeping a journal while he was composing the novel; this was the Jonmal of tbe Counterferters, which he published in the same year as the novel. Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire $96z) is another and different instance of the involuted narrative method. There is also what is known as the 'fallible' or'unreliable narrator'. Such a narrator is one whose perception and interpretation of what he or she narrates does not correspond or coincide with the perceptions, interpretations and opinions of the author who is or purports to be the controlling force in the narration. Thus, there is a kind of contrived discrepancy between the narrator (what James called 'the centre of consciousness') and the actual author. Henry James was a pastmaster of this technique (e.g. in The Aspern Papers, 1888). See also AEsrHETrc DrsrANcE; coNFEssIoNAL NovEL; DrAlocrc/voNorocrc; fNoNcf/fNoNcrATroN; Eprsror.ARy NovEL; FIcELLE; FREE INDTREcT srvr,r/orscouRsE; NARRAToLocy; NovEL; PERSoNAn; fcrr; sTREAMo F coNscrousNEss; suBJEcTIvrTYA ND oBJECTMTY;V IE\TPOINT. t36 r6cit (F 'narration, narrative, accounts of events, recital') A form of fictional narrative which is related to the ncuelk, the Nmtelle, the roman and the nouvelle (qq.o.). Andr6 Gide, one of its most notable practitioners, made a clear distinction benreen his ramans and his rdcits. Les Faax-monnayeurs (t926), for instance, is a romdn; L'Immoraliste (r9oz) and La Porte Atroite Ugog) are outstanding examples of the rdcit. Gide theorized about both forms, and debate as to precisely what a ricit is and is not continues. Typically, a rdcit has a high degree of compression and concentration and the narrative is related from one point of view (rwo in La Porte itroite\.It has a single theme and very few characters, apart from the central character on whom attention is focused almost exclusively. Events and actions should speak for themselves and the reader is left to draw his or her own conclusions. Thus, there is no intervention on the part of the author to explain motives, pass judgements or draw conclusions. Gide's ricits combine intimate personal experience with a technique which is aimed to exclude the presence of the author. His elimination of the author in some ways prefigures Roland Banhes's celebrated exposition The Death of the Arthor (see etrnron, DEATH or). In order to achieve the required effacement he uses the first-person narrator device, but the first person is 'borrowed'. The author effaces himself behind his narrator (who is also his hero/heroine or one of the main characters). \Ufhereas in a novel events tend to unfold in a chronological sequence and are described as they occur, the events in a rdcit are depicted by an oblique, reflective and associative method. Rdcits may be as long as novels and a plot may extend over a longer period of time than does the single and significant episode of the noraelle. Therdcit seems to have a kind of intermediary position between novel andnouoelle. Apanfrom those cited, other examples which might fall into the rdcit category are Samuel Beckett's Mahne Dics $95r) and Albert Camus's La Chute (tg16).See also NARRAroLocy. viewpoint The position of the narrator in relation to his story; thus the outlook from which the events are related. There are many variations and combinations but three basic ones may be distinguished. Firstly, the omniscient - the author moves from character to character, place to place,a nde pisodeto episodew ith completef reedom,g ivingh imself accessto his characterst' houghts and feelingsw henever he chooses and providing information whenever he wishes. This is probably the commonestp oint of view and one which has beene stablishedfo r a very long time. Chaucer used the method very successfully in Troilus and Criseyde (c. rl8l); Fielding employed it in Torn Jones (tZ+il; Huxley in Braue New World (tglr); Gabriel Fielding inThe Birthday King $962). Such a point of view does not require the author to stay outside his narrative. He may interpolate his own commentaries. Secondly, the third person - the author chooses a character and the story is related in terms of that character in such a way that the field of vision is confined to him or her alone. A good example of this is 970 villain Strether in Henry James's The Ambassad.ors (tgol). Thirdly first person narrative - here the story is told in the first person by one of the characters. Vell-known examples are Defoe's Moll Fknders, Melville's Moby-Dich, Dickens's Great Expeaations, Mark Twain's The Ad,rtentures of Huchlebeny Finn,Conrad's Heart of Darkne.ss and Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. This method has become increasingly popular and has been used by many authors during the zoth c. A.recent instance is Graham Greene's Traoels uith My Aunt Gg6g). Various combinations of these methods have been attempted by many authors; in some cases deliberately; in some, apparendy, haphazardly. For example: Dickens shifts his viewpoint continually in Bleah House (1812-3). So does Tolstoy inWar and Peace Q865-72).In many cases the viewpoint is restricted to a minor character within the story. Examples of this method are to be found in Emily Bronr6's Wathering Heights $8+il, Conrad's Victory (rgr l) and Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge 0g++). Percy Lubbock's Tbe Craft of Fiaion (t926),E. M. Forsrer's Aspeas of the Novel Ogzil and HenryJamest prefaces to his novels (eventually collected and published as The Art of the Novel, ry1.d are important discourses on the matter of point of view. Since those days theory on this aspect of the novelist's art, and, indeed, of the story-teller's art in general, has proliferated. See also AEsrHETrc DrsrANcE; coNFEssroNAL NOVEL; EPISTOLARY NOVEL; NARRATOLOGY; NARRATOR; NOVEL; PERSONA; n6Crr; STREAM OF CONSCTOUSNESSS; UBJECTTVTTYA ND oBJECTTVTTY.