I recently attended another stimulating meeting of the mighty Cambridge SF Workshop, and we wound up spending a lot of time talking about the use of the "omniscient" narrative voice in the work under discussion.
For those who slept through high-school English, a work has an omniscient narrator when the narrative voice describes things which aren't necessarily known or apparent to the characters during the action of the story. A well-known example from English class is Jane Austen, who uses it in almost all her books. You hear about the family's background and the state of their fortunes, or what characters are doing off in Bath or London, even while the heroines are sitting at home. It's a staple of 19th Century European literature, and turns up in Tolstoy, Balzac, Conrad, and Victor Hugo.
One of my favorites is Henry Fielding's narrative voice in Tom Jones. The omniscient narrator, with his deadpan commentary on the action, is probably the most vivid character in the story.
This contrasts with more limited points of view, like the first-person narrator who recounts only what that character saw and did, as he understood it. Or the first cousin of first-person, the "limited" third-person narrator who more or less sits on one character's shoulder and only describes that person's point of view.
But it occurs to me that even the "omniscient" narrator isn't truly all-knowing, or at least doesn't tell everything. After all, the narrator doesn't tell the reader in advance what's going to happen to all the characters, or spoil all the startling revelations before their time.
So in a way the "omniscient" narrator is kind of a card trick: the author overloads the reader with information, while holding back the key elements which drive the story. The mark reading the book is distracted by background details and history, and doesn't notice the author palming the plot.
Writing, we all know, is the art of telling a story. But sometimes the most important part of telling is what you don't tell. Narration is one way to control what information you pass along to the reader, and sometimes even the omniscient narrator is keeping secrets.
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