Is God (as narrator, that is) dead?

I might be shot down in flames for this, but I find the Omniscient point of view a bit old-fashioned.

Of course there are exceptions, and some writers can still handle it with skill and applomb. But I’m talking generally here.

Okay, this is out of context and it is an old-fashioned example. But despite the fact that we probably all read Little Women voraciously as children, I’d like you to consider how you’d respond to this in a modern novel:

As young readers like to know ‘how people look’, we will take this moment to give them a little sketch of the four sisters, who sat knitting away in the twilight, while the December snow fell quietly without, and the fire crackled cheerfully within…

Writer and critic, James Wood believes the history of the novel has, over the past couple of hundred years, been moving us away from the Omniscient point of view toward what he calls the “free indirect” style.

This is similar to what we call 3rd person attached point of view. A writer will use grammatical 3rd person, but remain “attached” to one person. They can see, hear, smell and experience what their character does, but no more. They can’t see around corners, as an all-knowing, all-seeing narrator could.

This allows writers to express the story in the voice, and from within the world view, of their protagonist. Sure, it creates obstacles to overcome. You can’t tell us how beautiful your protagonist is, with her flowing tresses, without making her seem insufferably vain.

James Wood believes the advantage of this point of view is its versatility. You can zoom in on your character and remain there. Or you can zoom out ever so slightly, to give us a faintly wider perspective.

This doesn’t mean leaping into someone else’s head or seeing around corners. It’s a subtle closing in or lifting out – without losing the integrity of the character’s voice. So you can show us strictly what your character is thinking, or you can lift slightly to what they could be thinking or noticing.

Richard and I had been thinking about this for some time, so it was good to find that we were thinking along vaguely the same lines as a writer of his calibre. 

New writers often don’t give much thought to point of view. They launch into a story, often in grammatical third person. They’ll be attached to a protagonist’s perspective when … suddenly they hit an obstacle.

Their protagonist sallies forth, thinks about her day, looks forward to her evening, and then arrives at the party.

Oops, the writer suddenly realises they’d really like to show what the protagonist looks like as she makes her entrance. So they leap across the room into the head of some completely random and irrelevant bystander, like the waiter, whom we’ve never met before and will never see again.

And this empty character can then think: “Now there was a pair of legs if ever he’d seen one.”

It doesn’t really work. We don’t have a relationship with the waiter. We don’t care what he thinks. He has no credibility with us. How do we know he’s even an expert on legs?

This is one of the reasons we sometimes find pure Omniscience disturbing. Another is that Richard and I believe it implies an overriding truth.

Some all-seeing, all-knowing narrator is giving us the story. They know everything, and they’re going to give us the full truth.

Yet we no longer believe in an overarching or universal truth. We believe in fragmentary truths, in partial truths, in truth filtered through the prejudices and beliefs of those giving them to us.

Every narrator is somewhat unreliable. We’re used to this. We know that every person forms their own truth around events. We look at them, consider who they are, and make up our own minds.

The way someone tells us a story gives us as much information about them as it does about the events they’re describing.

And this is surely what the story is about, as much as the plot-line. We’re interested in people, in exploring how they see things and what motivates them to do certain things.