The ABCs of POV: Third-Person Narration

Photo by Tegan Mierle on Unsplash.

Who is telling your story and how are they telling it? Perhaps you’ve thought about this and deliberately picked a narration style before you started writing; perhaps it hasn’t crossed your mind and you just write from a point of view (POV) that feels natural. Regardless, it’s useful to understand the different options and how they impact your story, so let’s dive in!

Third person uses he/she/they pronouns. Third is the most flexible of the narration styles, with lots of different variations, but they can be generally lumped into two categories: limited and omniscient.

Limited

In third person limited, readers experience everything the POV-character does, including their thoughts and emotions. Third-person limited can feel more immediate and in-the-moment than some of the other POV styles; readers are along for the ride, unsure of what will happen to the protagonist. I find it quite similar to first person where narrator proximity is concerned. Here is an example of limited narration from the adult horror novel The Staircase in the Woods by Chuck Wendig:

The sound dragged Owen out of the depths of that dark dream. The sour feeling of it remained, stuck to him like tree sap. He pawed at the nightstand, extracting himself from the chaos of computer parts and tangled sheets. Wincing in the harsh platinum light of late morning, he looked at the phone, then sat up.

The caller:

Lore.

Panic laced through his chest, tightening it. Not just panic. Anger, too.

He cleared his throat, went to answer, then paused. Should he? Could he?

Owen denied the call, kept the phone face down against his chest. He looked around his apartment—a spare, bland, chaotic space, because he did little to organize it, little to decorate it, little of anything. It was just the bleak place in which he existed, the place he slept in and showered in and ate gussied-up instant ramen in.

…because you don’t deserve anything better. The thought circled his brain again and again like an EDM loop.

He thought about burying his head under the pillow again, but he checked the phone for a voicemail—

But instead, it rang again. Lore.

“Shit.”

In the above example, you can feel Owen’s tension and distress, even though you don’t know what it’s about yet, and you even get some of Owen’s direct thoughts in italics.

Remember, you cannot narrate something the POV-character does not know or does not see. You’re not confined to narrating the entire novel from that character’s perspective and can switch to another character’s POV, though I recommend starting a new chapter with a new POV-character rather than switching in the middle of a scene, as abrupt shifts in whose head they’re in can feel disorienting to readers.

Omniscient

In third-person omniscient, the narrator knows everything, including every characters’ thoughts and feelings. The narrator can be unbiased and unobtrusive, simply relating events as they happen so readers don’t really think of them as a character, or they can offer their own thoughts and colourful commentary. Here is an example of third-person omniscient narration from the adult sci-fi novel Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente:

Once upon a time on a small, watery, excitable planet called Earth, in a small, watery, excitable country called Italy, a soft-spoken, rather nice-looking gentleman by the name of Enrico Fermi was born into a family so overprotective that he felt compelled to invent the atomic bomb. Somewhere in between discovering various heretofore cripplingly socially anxious particles and transuranic elements and digging through plutonium to find the treat at the bottom of the nuclear box, he found the time to consider what would come to known as the Fermi Paradox. If you’ve never heard this catchy little jingle before, here’s how it goes: given that there are billions of stars in the galaxy quite similar to our good old familiar standby sun, and that many of them are quite a bit further on in years than the big yellow, lady, and the probability that some of these stars will have planets quite similar to our good old familiar knockabout Earth, and that such planets, if they can support life, have a high likelihood of getting around to it sooner or later, then someone out there should have sorted out interstellar travel by now, and therefore, even at the absurdly primitive crawl of early-1940s propulsion, the entire Milky Way could be colonized in only a few million years.

So where is everybody?

Many solutions have been proposed to soothe Mr. Fermi’s plaintive cry of transgalactic loneliness. One of the most popular is the Rare Earth Hypothesis, which whispers kindly: There, there, Enrico. Organic life is so complex that even the simplest algae require a vast array of extremely specific and unforgiving conditions to form up into the most basic recipe for primordial soup. …

The Rare Earth Hypothesis means well, but it’s colossally, spectacularly, gloriously wrong.

Life isn’t difficult, it isn’t picky, it isn’t unique, and fate doesn’t enter into the thing.

In the above example, the narrator has a unique voice, slightly playful and sarcastic; it’s reminiscent of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which Valente no doubt took inspiration from. The narrator starts by telling us about a character named Enrico, but we’re immediately clued into the fact that the narrator knows more than Enrico does because they tell readers that the Rare Earth Hypothesis that Enrico is considering is wrong, and that there is plenty of sentient life in the universe.

You can also have a narrator who “feels” omniscient, because they narrate a story about other characters or including scenes they weren’t present for and throw around their own observations; a narrator like this pretends they know everything, but they aren’t actually all-knowing, such as Mycroft Canner in Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning.

The trick with omniscient narrators is getting readers to care about the story and its characters without the empathy inspired by a limited narrator. A strong voice and interesting commentary can help keep readers engaged. Light, humorous stories are a good fit for omniscient narrators for this reason. Omniscient narration also allows for easy foreshadowing, a wide focus on multiple characters, a strong focus on story and plot, and entertaining exposition. Use it to reveal perspectives that your characters don’t have and if you want your novel to have a more classic feel.