X.J Kennedy Literature Chapter 2 Key terms

Total omniscience

Total omniscience

Point of view in which the narrator knows everything about all of the characters and events in a story. A narrator with ___ can move freely from one character to another. Generally, ___ narrative is written in the third person.

Limited or selective omniscience

Point of view in which the narrator sees into the minds of some but not all of the characters. Most typically, ____sees through the eyes of one major or minor character.

Impartial omniscience

Point of view employed when an omniscient narrator, who presents the thoughts and actions of the characters, does not judge them or comment on them.

Editorial omniscience

Point of view employed when an omniscient narrator goes beyond reporting the thoughts of his characters to make a critical judgment or commentary, making explicit the narrator's own thoughts or attitudes.

Objective point of view

Point of view in which the third-person narrator merely reports dialogue and action with little or no interpretation or access to the characters' minds.

Omniscient or all-knowing narrator

A narrator who has the ability to move freely through the consciousness of any character. The omniscient narrator also has complete knowledge of all of the external events in a story.

Participant or first-person narrator

A narrator who is a participant in the action. Such a narrator refers to himself or herself as "I" and may be a major or minor character in the story.

Observer

A first-person narrator who is relatively detached from or plays only a minor role in the events described.

Nonparticipant or third-person narrator

A narrator who does not appear in the story as a character but is usually capable of revealing the thoughts and motives of one or more characters.

Innocent or naive narrator

A character who fails to understand all the implications of the story he or she tells. ____-often a child or childlike adult—is frequently used by an author to generate irony, sympathy, or pity by creating a gap between what the narrator perceives and what the reader knows.

Unreliable narrator

A narrator who-intentionally or unintentionally—relates events in a subjective or distorted manner. The author usually provides some indication early on in such stories that the narrator is not to be completely trusted.

Interior monologue

An extended presentation of a character's thoughts in a narrative. Usually written in the present tense and printed without quotation marks, an interior monologue reads as if the character were speaking aloud to himself or herself, for the reader to overhear.

Stream of consciousness

A type of modern narration that uses various literary devices, especially interior monologue, in an attempt to duplicate the subjective and associative nature of human consciousness.