Narrative: What Is It and What Types Are There?
Every work of prose must have a narrative voice that describes events from its own perspective. The novelist decides who will take on this role and how the story will be conveyed to readers. Several basic types of narrative are commonly used in literature, along with different types of narrators classified according to their role in the novel. What characterises the various narrative styles, and which one should you choose when writing a novel?
What is narrative?
Narrative is the way events are presented in a literary or film work, including the narrator’s perspective, the style and the structure of the story.
Its purpose, therefore, is to convey the plot of a work to readers and present its fictional world. A narrator, meanwhile, is a fictional person created by the author who recounts the course of the action.
The way a story is conveyed affects how the work is understood and later interpreted, which is why the narrator’s construction should be adapted to the style of the prose.
The most popular types of narrative in prose
Traditional narrative theory most often distinguishes three types, which differ in the grammatical form used:
- first-person narrative,
- second-person narrative,
- third-person narrative.
Depending on the type of narrative chosen, the person telling the story may have greater or lesser knowledge of events and may sometimes be one of the novel’s characters.
First-person narrative
In first-person narrative, the narrator is involved in the events and tells the story from their own perspective, using the pronoun “I”. Their knowledge is limited to their own experiences.
This gives readers access to the character’s emotions, feelings and thoughts, allowing them to find themselves at the very centre of events—something often missing from other types of storytelling. Reality is always presented subjectively, however, with no access to the thoughts of other characters.
First-person narrative is most often found in works that take the form of a memoir or diary, but it is also used in contemporary, crime and fantasy novels, among others.
In this form of narrative, the author may use the present tense (“I leave the house and start looking around”) or the past tense (“I was so tired that I fell asleep after a few minutes”). First-person narration in the past tense appears, for example, in Charles Bukowski’s novel Women, while Suzanne Collins used the present tense in The Hunger Games.
Second-person narrative
In second-person narrative, the reader becomes the protagonist of the novel, while the narrative voice addresses them using personal pronouns such as “you” and “your”—“you enter the room and the light blinds you”, “you are tired and go to bed”.
In this way, the reader becomes involved in the plot, even though they do not know where it is heading and cannot discover the emotions of the other characters.
This is the least commonly used type of narrative, usually chosen for short forms such as short stories. It was used, among others, by Victor Pelevin in The Ontology of Childhood.
Third-person narrative
In this case, the narrator tells the story from the perspective of a so-called invisible observer or a character, but is always an external narrative voice.
This makes it possible to provide a broader context—characters’ thoughts are often conveyed through free indirect discourse, and the narrator’s knowledge need not be limited to the main character.
Third-person narrative makes it easier to add momentum to the action and allows sudden changes of place or time in order to present the experiences of other characters. In such novels, readers can learn the fate of every character while also distancing themselves from the events and receiving only an external account.
Authors use the past tense in third-person narrative, as in Agatha Christie’s crime novel Murder on the Orient Express, or the present tense, as in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall.
How can you identify types of narrator?
In addition to the narrative types listed above, classified according to person, there are other systems in which the narrator is categorised according to their knowledge and the function they perform in the novel. How do these types differ?
The narrator and their knowledge
Based on the narrative voice’s level of knowledge, prose works feature:
- an omniscient narrator—one with unlimited knowledge of events who knows the unspoken thoughts of all the characters, is familiar with the past and future, and comments on and evaluates events (for example, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace);
- a limited narrator—one connected to a particular character or characters, whose knowledge determines the limits of what they know (for example, George Orwell’s 1984).
The narrator and their role in the novel
Depending on the function performed by the person telling the story, we can identify three types of narrator:
- a first-person narrator—an active participant in the action who tells the story from their own perspective;
- a personal narrator—one who presents the story through the eyes of a single character who is not the narrative voice (for example, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice);
- an authorial narrator—one who tells the story from the perspective of a commentator or observer who does not take part in the events but comments on them (for example, Eliza Orzeszkowa’s On the Niemen).
Other types of narrative
Alongside the basic types of narrative used in prose, there are also less common forms employed by authors.
One interesting technique is behavioural narrative, which is limited to presenting what can be observed from the outside, without examining the character’s emotions. The narrator therefore describes the characters’ gestures, utterances and behaviour objectively. This style can be found, for example, in Ernest Hemingway’s short story Hills Like White Elephants.
Some novels also use epistolary narrative, which consists of quoting letters, diaries or other documents. In such cases, this first-person material leads the reader through the plot. This type is usually combined with another form of narrative, as in Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther.
Another type is collective narrative, in which the story is told by a collective voice (“we”), such as an entire community or group of characters, rather than by a single narrator. This type of storytelling appears in Christiane F. by Christiane F.
An intriguing option is also stream-of-consciousness narrative, which presents a character’s inner thoughts and emotions chaotically, often without clear logic or punctuation, to reflect the natural flow of thought. It appears, for example, in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.
Which type of narrative should you choose?
The choice of a particular type of narrative depends above all on the author and the kind of novel they are writing.
In crime novels, where events need to be presented from different perspectives, it is worth choosing an omniscient third-person narrator. In contemporary novels, however, where the characters’ emotions and thoughts are more important, first-person narrative or a personal narrator may be a better choice.
Writers very often do not choose a single narrative model, but combine several types in one work, creating so-called mixed narratives, or opt for multiple narrators. This makes it much easier to present a story from different perspectives while preserving the author’s individual style.
Summary
- Narrative is a way of telling a story in a literary work; the narrator presents the plot and guides the reader.
- There are three basic types of narrative based on grammatical form: first-person, second-person and third-person.
- An omniscient narrator has complete knowledge of the plot and characters, whereas a limited narrator knows only what the character they are connected to knows.
- Narrators can also be distinguished by their role in the novel: first-person, personal and authorial.
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