Who Tells the Story: Point of View, Narrators and Stream of Consciousness

25 min

One moment, five ways

The same small event, written for this lesson, is told below in five ways. Read them all before reading any notes.

Point of view	The passage
A	I saw the boy's hand before I saw his face. It hovered over my avocados as if they were hot. I thought of my own son at school in Musanze, and I said nothing.
B	You see the boy's hand before you see his face. It hovers over your avocados. You think of your own son, and you say nothing.
C	Nyiraneza saw the boy's hand before she saw his face. It hovered over her avocados as if they were hot. She thought of her own son at school, and said nothing.
D	Nyiraneza saw the boy's hand before she saw his face. The boy, Gatete, had eaten nothing since the morning before and was sure that she had not noticed him. Neither of them knew that, a week later, they would meet again in the headteacher's office.
E	The boy's hand moved towards the pile of avocados. The woman looked up. "Three hundred francs each," she said. The boy put his hand in his pocket.

Each version gives you different knowledge and a different feeling. A is intimate; B pulls you into the woman's place; C stays with her but in the third person; D sees into both minds and even into the future; E shows only what a camera would record, and leaves the thinking to you.

Definition

point of view: the position from which a story is told: who tells it, and how much the teller knows.
first-person narrator: a character who tells the story as "I" (passage A). Second person: the story addresses "you" as the character (B).
third-person limited: a narrator outside the story who uses "he" or "she" and follows the thoughts of one character only (C).
omniscient narrator: a third-person narrator who knows everything, including the thoughts of several characters, the past and the future, and may comment (D).
objective (dramatic) narrator: a third-person narrator who reports only what can be seen and heard, never thoughts (E).
unreliable narrator: a narrator whose account the reader has reason to doubt, through ignorance, bias or dishonesty.

What each point of view does

Point of view	Gains	Loses	Examples
First person	Intimacy, voice, the chance of an unreliable narrator	Cannot know other minds or events the narrator missed	Pip in Dickens's Great Expectations; Ramatoulaye writing her long letter in Mariama Bâ's So Long a Letter
Third limited	Closeness to one mind with some distance for irony	Other characters stay mysterious	Mrs Mallard in Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour"
Omniscient	Wide view, many minds, the narrator's judgement	Can feel distant or controlling	George Eliot's Middlemarch
Objective	Suspense, subtext; the reader must infer	No direct access to feeling	Ernest Hemingway's short stories of the 1920s

Achebe's Things Fall Apart mixes modes. The narrator often speaks with the shared voice of the clan, explaining customs as a respected elder might, and then moves close to Okonkwo's thoughts, and at the very end jumps into the mind of the District Commissioner. That final shift is a structural shock: after a whole novel spent inside Igbo life, we suddenly see Okonkwo through the eyes of a colonial officer who thinks his life deserves a paragraph.

Stream of consciousness

Modernist novelists wanted to go further inside: to show thought as it actually moves, jumping by association from one thing to another. Here is Clarissa Dalloway, a London hostess in her early fifties, stepping out into a June morning in London. The fresh air makes her remember a morning at Bourton, the country house of her youth:

What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen …
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925)

Association. The feeling of the London air triggers the memory of Bourton, more than thirty years earlier, with no "she remembered that".
Two times at once. "which she could hear now" and "stiller than this of course" bring the present into the memory.
The shape of thought. Exclamations, a chain of phrases joined by semicolons, comparisons that correct themselves ("like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave"), and a bracket that adds an afterthought.
Free indirect style. The narrator speaks in the third person ("she"), but the excitement ("What a lark!") is Clarissa's own.

Definition

stream of consciousness: a technique that presents the continuous, unordered flow of a character's thoughts, feelings and memories as they occur, often moving by association.
interior monologue: a character's thoughts given directly, in the first person, as if overheard. It is one way of writing stream of consciousness; free indirect style is another.

Worked example

A model analytical paragraph

Question: How does Woolf use stream of consciousness in this passage?

Woolf uses stream of consciousness to show that, for Clarissa, the past is alive inside the present. The passage moves without warning from a London morning to Bourton: the exclamations "What a lark! What a plunge!" belong to both mornings at once, and the clause "which she could hear now" lets a sound from decades earlier enter the present tense of her mind. The sentence imitates the movement of memory, adding phrase after phrase with semicolons and correcting itself, "like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave", as if Clarissa were searching for the exact sensation. Even the bracket "(for a girl of eighteen as she then was)" reads like a thought that arrives in the middle of another. Instead of telling us that Clarissa is nostalgic, Woolf makes us experience her nostalgia as she does, all at once and out of order.

Tip

Ask two questions of any narrator: Who knows? Who sees? The person telling the story and the person through whose eyes we see it are not always the same. In passage C, the narrator tells but Nyiraneza sees.

Warning

Don't call every first-person narrator "the author". Pip is not Dickens.
Stream of consciousness is not "a long sentence". Say how it imitates the movement of thought: association, time-shifts, fragments.
Don't confuse "objective narrator" with "honest narrator". It means only that the narrator reports outward action and speech.

"What is Stream of Consciousness?", from the Oregon State Guide to Literary Terms. Listen for the link to the psychologist William James, who first described thought as a "stream", and for the writers it names.

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Practice

Identify the point of view: (a) "He did not know that his sister had already read the letter, nor that she had burned it." (b) "I never told my mother about the exam." (c) "The door opened. A man in a grey coat came in and sat down without a word."
Rewrite passage E (objective) as third-person limited from the boy's point of view.
Give one advantage and one disadvantage of a first-person narrator.
What makes a narrator unreliable? Give two possible causes.
Find two features of stream of consciousness in the Mrs Dalloway passage.
Why is the shift into the District Commissioner's mind at the end of Things Fall Apart so powerful? Write about 100 words.

Show answersHide answers

(a) omniscient: the narrator knows what he does not know and what his sister did; (b) first person; (c) objective: only outward action, no thoughts.
For example: "Gatete reached for the avocados, sure that the woman was not looking. She looked up. 'Three hundred francs each,' she said. His face burned, and he pushed his empty hand into his pocket."
Advantage: intimacy and a distinctive voice; we share the narrator's feelings. Disadvantage: we know only what the narrator knows, and cannot see into other characters.
A narrator is unreliable when the reader has reason to doubt the account: for example youth or ignorance, strong bias or self-interest, madness, or deliberate lying.
Any two: association (the London air triggers Bourton); past and present mixed ("which she could hear now"); exclamations; phrases joined by semicolons; self-correction; a bracketed afterthought; free indirect style.
After long immersion in Igbo life through a narrator who explains it from inside, the reader suddenly sees Okonkwo through a colonial officer who reduces his tragedy to a paragraph. The shift exposes how colonial writing shrank African lives and makes the reader feel the injustice of that view.

Sources and credits

Quotation from Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925): public domain in Rwanda and the United States.
Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe) and So Long a Letter (Mariama Bâ) are in copyright and are discussed, not quoted.
Video: What is Stream of Consciousness?, OSU School of Writing, Literature and Film, embedded from YouTube.
The five Nyiraneza passages, tables, model paragraph and practice written by Ganzaa.
Diagram (SVG) written by Ganzaa.

1One moment, five ways

2What each point of view does

3Stream of consciousness

One moment, five ways

What each point of view does

Stream of consciousness