Narrative Voice and Point of View in Literature
Point of view as narrative voice. As narrative voice, the narrator’s point of view is actually a narrative technique connected with the stance that the narrator takes in relation to the story he tells. The narrator may adopt points of view. For example, he can be an external voice, a voice that stands in a supernatural position above all the characters he has created, aware of what they know and how they feel; but on occasions the narrator may be the voice of a principal, often the main, character, or the voice of one of the minor characters of the story who, standing on the edges of the main incidents and circumstances of the plot, adopts the position of an observer.
The omniscient narrator has been probably the most common in literature. Critics who dislike these narrators mock them as spies with sophisticated devices, thanks to which we are provided with information about other characters that is not given to them. Although we can occasionally be used by the omniscient narrator, it is more appropriate for the fictional memoir, the intrusive narrator and the first-person narrator. In the First-Person Narrator, the narrator is one of the central characters invented by the author, that is, the author dresses up as one of the principal fictional characters and will conduct the thread of the story, from his point of view. The constant repetition of the I pronoun and its related forms (my, mine, me) gives his account the value of the testimony of a witness, and therefore, of first-hand information. A fringe narrator is also a fictional character as the first-person narrator, but his role in the events of the plot is probably minimal or irrelevant, as he stands on the outskirts or borders of the action. His main function is to observe, and when he takes a hand in the plot his role is a minor one. Although he may try to be fair, his account of facts may also be biased as in first-person narration. The third-person narrator, however, is not a fictional character in the plot. As an outsider to the story, he observes all the characters from a privileged stance referring to them with the neutral ‘he’, ‘she’ or ‘they’. This more distant point of view enjoys greater credibility and his accounts are deemed more authentic and trustworthy by the reader. The intrusive narrator, also called ‘authorial comment’, is very common in the nineteenth and twentieth century novel. Authors occasionally offer the reader general statements or interpretations; these comments have not been universally approved of by modern critics, because of their irrelevance and the inevitable interruption of the narrative thread. Alternate narrators. This technique consists in having several first-person narrators narrating alternatively; according to the combination of narrators there are several possible variations on this technique. All these variations have the common feature of presenting information in interrupted sequences, that is, intermittently. Some think that this point of view is more natural and realistic than the linear, single point of view, since our perception of reality is seldom linear: it often comes at intervals, in an intermittent way.
Chinese boxes. Many stories, especially in literature, alternate between the first and third person. In this case, an author will move back and forth between a more omniscient third-person narrator to a more personal first-person narrator. Often, a narrator using the first person will try to be more objective by also employing the third person for important action scenes, especially those in which he/she is not directly involved or in scenes where he/she is not present to have viewed the events in first person.
Point of view as ideological orientation. As ideological orientation, the notion of point of view refers to the perspective that produces two rewarding effects: (a) filter; and (b) attachment or distance. Events and characters exist only in the way in which the narrator presents them to the reader. In this way the ‘narrative point of view’ acts as an alert and knowledgeable filter of all the events and circumstances that take place in the story before the reader comes to know them. This filter will also affect the characters’ speech and thoughts; the narrator will intervene by converting them into narrativized speech and thought through indirect style. The concept of attachment alludes to the psychological distance between the narrator and the characters of the narration that the author has created when choosing a point of view. This ‘distance’ should be interpreted as the degree of support or sympathy which readers are induced to experience.
The polyphony of the text. As we have seen, point of view is an influential narrative artifice. It may arouse the reader’s sympathy or antagonism when the narrator tells him of the events that take place and the things done by the characters. But characters also speak and think, they are social beings that interact, i.e., they perform a communicative function. The primary role of speech in narrative discourse is, as one could expect, the introduction of a social or ethical argument, the presentation of facts or evidence, the assessment of a moral issue, etc. But it also serves for the description of setting and mood, for the progression of plot (cf textual progressivity in chapter 2) and, above all, for the development of character. And, although there is usually a balance in prose between discourse presenting setting and characters (description), discourse presenting action and events (narration) and speech, in some novels speech bears the greatest responsibility in the creation of plot, action, setting and character. For example in Compton-Burnett’s A Family and a Fortune, about 98 per cent of the novel consists of dialogue.
Textual speech is formed by the voices of all the characters; in this case, the text becomes ‘polyphonic’, as the narrator’s lone voice joins a consortium of other voices. These voices may emerge, in theory, as independent or with some degree of semantic and literary independence from the author, but as Bakhtin has pointed out they are dependent and are useful to the intention of the writer “lui servant, jusqu’a un certain point, de second langage”.
In order to present their voices, their actual speech, and their thoughts, narrative discourse provides the author of a literary work with another relevant device, called modes of presentation of speech and thought, consisting of the techniques used by the narrator in presenting the actual speech and thoughts of characters. The most traditional methods of speech presentation are direct speech and indirect speech.
Direct speech (a) It gives fictional characters autonomy to speak directly without any apparent authorial filter. Autonomy in this case means that the actual words of the characters are not mediated in any way by the narrator, as in this short passage from John Buchan. The opposite of autonomy in this case is “narrativisation”, as we shall see in the other techniques of speech presentation. (b) Autonomy helps in creating the impression of naturalness, of proximity and even of intimacy. The presentation of the original register of formality by preserving the original lexical and syntactic features of the actual utterance help in the creation of impression of naturalness:(c) And finally, it gives variety to the text, as the voice of the narrator alternates intermittently with the voices of the characters. Then the text is said to become polyphonic, breaking the possible monotony of the narrator’s sole voice. The text is now richer with new voices that can offer stylistic variety in lexis, syntax, phonology dialect and register.
In indirect speech there is, however, a smooth bringing together of narration and speech into a harmonized entity. A great part of this smoothness is due to the fact that the third person pronoun of narration has absorbed the original first and second person pronouns of direct speech. In indirect speech there is a main clause including the verba dicendi, which identifies the speaker, and a subordinate clause in which the changes in tense and pronouns have taken place.
When the supposed dialogue, i.e., speech, has been absorbed by narration (with the corresponding changes in lexis and grammatical forms) Genette calls this method of speech presentation “narrativised speech” because narration has absorbed or incorporated speech into itself and the transition from speech into narration is hardly discernible, while we have seen that indirect speech implies the manipulation of the characters’ voice by the narrator. In narrativised speech there is a greater degree of manipulation by the narrator of the actual speech of the characters. Very often we cannot retrieve the actual words uttered by the characters because there are no clues or hints left that could help the reader to reconstruct the original utterance.
As a consequence of the easy integration of speech and narration, there is a free movement from one to the other, which adds two further positive features, with the result that the tempo of the narrative text gains in vividness and pace.
The linguistic differences between direct and indirect style include three types of changes, all of them related to deixis, plus a fourth one, the presence of the optional ‘that’:
- a) changes in the tense (there is a backshift);
- b) changes in the person of the subject of the clause;
- c) changes in other words;
(1) It cannot always guarantee the exact reproduction of the characters’ words. For example, it can manipulate the communicative meaning of the characters’ words by giving more prominence to some parts of the original utterance (The use of techniques such as thematisation, especially by using It was his mother who … etc.)
(2) There is not always an even balance between the language of the narrator and the language of the characters; in other words, smooth integration is usually achieved at the expense of speech. The language of the narrator is always expected to exhibit accurate diction and well- built syntax. The characters’ speech does not necessarily have to be so perfect. Inevitably the characters’ speech is influenced by the richer and more careful prose of the narrator. However, this merge in the register of the narrator’s voice and the characters’ speech is sometimes desirable from a literary point of view.
(3) Not all direct utterances or sentences can be turned into indirect style. As Seymour Chatman has pointed out, some sentences can only appear in direct form. “Egbert blurted out, ‘How I have loved it!’” cannot be transformed to “Egbert blurted out how he had loved it” and still preserve its original meaning. In the first sentence ‘how’ means ‘how much’, while in the second it means ‘in what manner’”.
In order to overcome or to reduce the problems caused by the shortcomings of the two traditional methods of speech presentation, direct and indirect speech, many experiments have been carried out in the presentation of characters’ speech. As a result of these experiments new methods of speech presentation have arisen. The variety of techniques is much richer than all the taxonomies that have attempted to summarise them. The most important classes in modern prose seem to be: free indirect speech, free direct speech, submerged speech and summarised speech.
Free indirect speech is used in the representation of verbal events (utterances) and non- verbal events (thoughts). This modality of speech tries to have the advantages of both direct and indirect speech. As indirect speech, free indirect speech has narrativisation, that is, a smooth integration of narration and speech, the presence of the narrator being linguistically felt in the backshift of tenses, in the subordinate clause with a verb in the third person, and in the verba dicendi or ‘speech verbs’. And it also has the advantages of direct speech because the actual words of the characters are kept with their exclamations, repetitions, interruptions, vulgar or colloquial expression. Consequently this speech is not ‘neutral’, as it does not eliminate or erase the traits of the original words in their actual utterance.
As free indirect speech displays an atypical structure (Oltean, 1995: 21-41), delimiting what it is has been a source of challenge and bafflement for both linguists and stylisticians, most of whom think that free indirect speech is a label or cover-word that embraces many experiments in the immediate representation of spontaneous, non-reflexive consciousness, including states of perception, dreams or fantasies. This is the reason why the verba dicendi can include, besides verbs of saying and asking (say, ask, wonder, answer, reply, etc.), others, such as psychological verbs (think, decide, realize, etc.), verbs of perception (see, feel, hear, etc.), verbs of exclamation (exclaim), “world creating verbs” (dream, imagine etc.). However, these verbs are external to the free indirect structure, being separated by commas (“Well then let her go and be damned to her, she told herself”. Mrs Dalloway), by dislocations (“What would he think, she wondered, when he came back?”. Mrs. Dalloway) or by parentheses (“But these questions of love (she thought, putting her coat away), this failing in love with women”. Mrs Dalloway).
In sum, free indirect speech has a ‘blended’ nature: (a) It is free, that is, it has grammatical autonomy in the preservation of the emotive element (exclamations, colloquialism, slangy words, etc.), in the syntactic features suggesting dialogue (I asked him what were you doing here?) or in the lack of subordination clauses; and (b) it is indirect in that it has the same changes in verbal forms (present tense becomes past tense, etc.) and in personal pronouns (first and second person, etc,) as in indirect speech.
Submerged speech shares a common feature with free indirect speech, viz., an attempt at narrativisation, which is absolute in submerged speech and relative in free indirect speech.
The term of stream of consciousness is the label applied to the effect of a number of techniques used to represent human consciousness, especially the embryonic stage of thought characterized by chaotic and contradiction, called ‘interior monologue’. However, not all the techniques that are so named really deserve this term, unless we only mean ‘inner awareness’ (Humphrey, R., 1953: 5). One of the characteristics shared by all the techniques of stream of consciousness is that the representation of thoughts does not follow the ordinary principles governing syntax. This absence of syntactic rigour, through the endless clustering of sentences and clauses, or their continuous branching is called anacoluthon. It is probably the result of the desire to reflect the flow of consciousness.
Thanks to the combination of free direct style and free indirect style in the expression of interior monologue, there has been an easy integration of stream of consciousness into modern narrative discourse as one of its chief components. The two styles, free direct and free indirect, due to their different linguistic structures, can be very suitable for the representation of different phases of the psychological process (Dolezel, L., 1966: 257-64), in which moments of lively emotion (expressed through free direct style) alternate with moments of tranquil reflection (expressed with free indirect style).
In this way, narrative discourse in this century has lost a great deal of its objective, realistic character and has become ‘polyphonic’ (Reyes, G., 1984), as two simultaneous levels reveal themselves outwardly: the level of extrospection, or external reality, and the level of introspection, or internal reality.