Narrative technique (Was: Theoretical boundaries / Dursleys' abuse)

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 120570


Alla wrote:
> 
> <snip> I believe Carol recently (or relatively recently) gave 
> very good description of the narrator in the books. I don't remember 
> the correct name for such narrator, but such narrator is not ever 
> completely objective.
> 
> I think it is called limited third  view narrator, but I am not sure. 
> The events are narrated not from Harry POV, BUT for the most part 
> narrator only sees events from Harry POV and identifies with him only.
> 
> If Carol reads it, maybe she will explain it better or corrects me.

Carol responds:
Thanks, Alla. The technical name for this type of narrator is
third-person limited, meaning that he or she writes in the third
person and is therefore not the protagonist or any other character,
but his or her "omniscience" is limited to the perspective of one
character (or a few characters)--it's still a limited omniscient
perspective when the narrator is seeing from Vernon Dursley's or Frank
Bryce's perspective. But the narrator does occasionally slip outside
this perspective to report events that the POV character isn't aware
of (e.g., the owls and people in cloaks that Vernon can't see because
his back is turned or Neville lying awake unbeknownst to Harry).
Technically, a limited omniscient narrator shouldn't do that and it
could be considered a flaw in the books. More important, such a
narrator is, as you say, not always reliable because he's limited
(most of the time) by the POV character's perspective and sometimes
inadequate knowledge (e.g., reporting as fact that the Potters died in
a car accident because that's what Harry thinks is true at the time).

But I think Del's concern is not with the built-in limitations and
occasional unreliability of this type of narrator. It's with the
narrator's emotional distance from Harry in the early books, which
disappears in the later books, especially OoP, where the narrator's
perspective is more difficult to separate from Harry's.

The narrator of SS/PS seems no more bothered by Harry's flicking a
spider off his sock as he wakes up in his cupboard than by Vernon
going out for lunch and nearly knocking down a small man in a violet
cloak. In fact, the narator's tone here is rather like that of
"Kennilworth Whisp" blithely reporting that the spectators at the
annual broom race in Sweden apparated to the finish line "to
congratulate the survivors" (QTA 4, a hilarious bit of understated
British humor, IMO). It's no concern of Whisp's that people have died
or suffered serious injuries in Quidditch matches; that's the nature
of the "sport" and of the WW. (Clearly Wizards have a level of
endurance far beyond that of mere Muggles since they can be struck by
a ten-inch iron ball and live to play again with undampened
enthusiasm!) But that comic indifference to suffering, whether Harry's
or the unnamed Appleby Arrows Seeker stung by wasps, is almost
entirely absent from the essentially humorless narration of OoP. If
you move to OoP directly from GoF, the transition is nearly invisible
(though Harry himself seems different). But if you jump from SS?PS to
OoP, it's immediately noticeable.

If anyone's interested in this topic, here's a link to one of my
earlier posts on the topic of the limited omniscient narrator:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/116981

My apologies for not having changed the subject line of that post to
reflect the content.

Carol, noting that Ingolfr the Iambic writes in (flawed) anapestic
tetrameter, not in iambic anything, at least as "translated" by
"Kennilworth Whisp"