Question RE: new info from jkr.com

[justcarol67]

Carol earlier:
> 
> "Yes, I know. I've posted about half a dozen times regarding the 
> limited omniscient narrator on the main list, mostly in response to 
> people who persist in calling Harry the narrator. A technicality, 
> maybe, but it's important to our understanding of the series. And 
> there *are* other instances when JKR departs from Harry's (for 
> example in GoF when the narrator reports that, unknown to Harry, 
> Neville is also lying awake). And I wouldn't call this 
> narrator "objective" since his/her observations are usually colored 
> by Harry's. The key word is "limited." Such narrators are unreliable 
> because they are limited by what the POV character experiences, 
> knows, and believes. If the POV character is misinformed, so is the 
> reader. (JKR cleverly uses the mind link with Voldemort to escape the 
> limitations of this POV, and of course she can't use Harry's POV in 
> SS/PS chapter one or the scene where Hermione sets Snape's robes on 
> fire.)"
> 
> Kim comments:
> 
> Not having been a literature major (but having been a voracious 
> reader most of my life), I wondered how you could tell specifically 
> when the POV changes from being limited to Harry's (written in third 
> person) to just the omniscient narrator's POV (also written in third 
> person).  My sense is that JKR inserts the omniscient narrator's POV 
> at various and unpredictable times, but that it happens relatively 
> often, not rarely. 

Carol responds:
Sorry. I have three degrees in literature and taught college English
for eighteen years, so I tend to get a bit carried away.

"Limited omniscient narrator" is a technical term for a third-person
narrator whose "omniscience" (bad term--ought to be knowledge or
perspective") is limited to one character or a very few characters.
The narrator usually presents the action through one character's eyes
but can on occasion slip outside the character's perspective to
comment on something he or she doesn't see (as when Neville is lying
awake but Harry doesn't know it). What a limited omniscient narrator
normally *can't* do is give us the thoughts or perspective of a
character other than the POV character, which is why we are never
inside Snape's or Draco's or Dumbledore's mind. JKR takes a few
liberties with the technique when she needs to tell us something that
Harry normally wouldn't be aware of (the mind link to Voldemort, for
example). The brief scene when Hermione is setting Snape's robes on
fire in SS/PS is outside Harry's perspective (he's in the air fighting
to keep control of his broom and has no idea what's happening in the
stands below). This scene appears to be objectively presented because
we don't get inside anyone's mind, but it's really from Hermione's
perspective. The action is presented as it appears to her, so the
reader thinks, as she does, that Snape is cursing Harry's broom.

There are other necessary exceptions to Harry as POV character. In
SS/PS, chapter one, he can't be the POV character because he's fifteen
months old and isn't even present much of the time. The POV shifts
from Vernon to a more or less omniscient narrator who sees the owls
and wizards invisible to Vernon because he's not looking out the
window. The scene with McGonagall, Dumbledore, and Hagrid is reported
almost entirely from the outside with no POV character. Near the end
of the scene, we're told what Dumbledore can see but we don't really
enter his mind to know his thoughts. From there we're told by a
temporarily omniscient narrator what Harry, a sleeping infant, can't
know, that he's about to be awakened by his Aunt Petunia's screams and
hit by his cousin Dudley and that people all over the country are
toasting him as The Boy Who Lived. The POV remains outside Harry
briefly in the opening of chapter two because Harry, now almost
eleven, is again asleep, but goes from there to what he can see and
what he experiences and what he "knows"--often wrong! (Note, for
example, that when Harry "realizes" in GoF that Cedric Diggory is just
an ignorant pretty boy that we're not supposed to accept this
"realization" as fact.)

One glaring example of limited omniscient narration where the POV is
not Harry's and not Voldemort's via the mind link is the dream
presented from Frank Bryce's POV. That one I'm not able to explain
except as an interesting literary device that JKR gets away with
because it pulls us in. 

At any rate, a limited omniscient narrator *normally* can't present
action at which the POV character is not present. A conversation that
takes place in the Slytherin common room can only be reported directly
if Harry overhears it using Polyjuice potion (or, in theory, his
invisibility cloak or some similar tactic). The narrator also can't
*normally* present other characters' thoughts. Consequently, if the
narrator says that Snape hates Harry, we don't know that for a fact
("fact" within the context of the novel). It's Harry's perception, his
interpretation of a look or words, presented to us by the limited
omniscient narrator.

How do we know when it's Harry's perception and when it's objective
narration? Actions and words that he sees and hears can be considered
objective "fact," still subject to our interpretation based on other
evidence, but more reliable than Harry's perception of these things.
Lupin or Snape *seems* to be reading his mind, for example. But the
narrator sometimes tricks us outright, as with the statement that
Harry's parents died in a car accident--his view of the facts at the
time. IIRC, there are also statements in PoA about Dementors being
able to see that also turn out to be incorrect. And we are misled in
every book regarding the identity of the villain or what he is after,
all because Harry perceives them incorrectly (SS/PS, wrong villain;
CoS, misjudging Tom Riddle; PoA, wrong villain; GoF, wrong villain;
OoP, misunderstanding the dream and the "vision" of Sirius being
tortured).

Kim: 
<snip> Taking a liberty here, I would call the POV in the books 
> something more like 3rd person omniscient "Harry-focused" vs.
"Harry-limited" if that makes any sense.  What I mean is that Harry is
the central focus of the story, the story revolves around him, and the 
> narrator tends to be limited by that as to which events are covered 
> and which aren't.  But the narration isn't necessarily filtered 
> through Harry's direct experience of it.  It's just *focused* on 
> Harry.  And of course I agree (and never thought otherwise) that 
> Harry is not the narrator.  The it would be written in first person 
> (as Harry), wouldn't it?

Carol:
I agree with your perception. But "limited omniscient narrator" is the
accepted term for describing this point of view. It isn't *always*
unreliable, but it has limitations similar to those of a first-person
narrator--or a real person. We can only be in one place at a time, we
can't know what anyone else is thinking, we misinterpret other
people's words and actions. The difference is that the limited
omniscient narration puts the reader in Harry's shoes without having
Harry tell the story, which would be extremely unrealistic and a
giveaway to his survival (unless the author tricks us by switching
from a first-person to a third-person POV as in "All Quiet on the
Western Front.") The point is, this narrator is neither omniscient nor
objective. He (or she) *can't* be or we would know more than Harry
does and there would be no mystery.

Kim: 
> Another example I found of omniscient POV (not limited to Harry's) 
> outside of the PS/SS and GoF examples you've given is the very first 
> chapter of GoF which includes the scenes, among others, with Frank 
> Bryce, Wormtail, and Voldemort in the Riddle House in Little 
> Hangleton.  This chapter wasn't just a detailed report of Harry's 
> dream (which wakes him up at the end of the chapter), because there 
> are too many details that he couldn't have known beforehand in order 
> for them to have been in his dream.

Carol:
I discussed the Frank Bryce segment earlier. Even here the narrator
isn't omniscient. He or she is still limited to a particular point of
view (that of a Muggle who doesn't believe in wizards)--an interesting
variation on the narrative technique but hard to justify if we assume
that Harry is *always* the POV character. As I said earlier, there are
scenes in SS/PS, at least, where the POV comes near to being
omniscient, but most of the time it's "limited omniscient," meaning
that the narrator's knowledge is limited by the knowledge and
perceptions of the character, which can be but are not always wrong.
> 
Kim:
> I've decided that the narrator in the HP books is generally reliable 
> insofar as you can rely on JKR for consistency in her writing.  I 
> mean, sometimes when the narrator seems unreliable, it may simply be 
> due to JKR having gotten her "facts" mixed up.


Carol:
Oh, dear. Flints. Errors and inconsistencies by JKR herself, as in how
many students are in Hogwarts or the age of the older Weasley boys or
the color of a Prefects badge. That's not the same thing as an
unreliable narrator (another technical term). 

Consider SS/PS. When the narrator says, "Hermione almost ran to the
stool and jammed the hat eagerly on her head," we can take this
statement as reliable even though "eagerly" is Harry's perception. The
adverb fits with the actions and the sentence gives the same
impression without it. But "It happened very suddenly. The hook-nosed
teacher [Snape] looked past Quirrell's turban straight into Harry's
eyes--and a sharp, hot pain shot across the scar on Harry's forehead."
this passage looks like straightforward reporting, but both Harry and
the unwary reader assume a cause-effect connection, reinforced by "The
pain had gone as quickly as it had come. Harder to shake off was the
feeling Harry had gotten from the teacher's look--a feeling that he
didn't like Harry at all," and by Harry's dream that night, in which
Draco turns into Snape and then Snape gives a high, cold laugh.

This is the kind of narration we should look out for. We see it again
when Harry *knows* that Snape wants to poison him, for example. We
can't take the narrator at his word here any more than we should
accept Sirius's advice to Harry to watch out for Karkaroff. We know,
on a second reading, that Sirius's advice is a red herring (though
well-intended). Many statements by the narrator are equally, if less
obviously, unreliable.

BTW, Kim, I'm not one of those readers who sees conspiracy theories
everywhere or distrusts every statement by the narrator. If the
narrator says in every book that Petunia is a Muggle, then Petunia is
a Muggle, and we shouldn't have to ask JKR to confirm that for us! I
also don't believe in ESE!Lupin or Time-traveling Dumbledore.

Carol, hoping that she hasn't gone into too much detail and confused
more than she's clarified