JKR's narrative strategy (Was: Whose point of view ?)

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 107122

I (Carol) wrote:

It's important to distinguish among different
types of narrative strategies because they affect our interaction 
with and understanding of the characters
> <snip>
> But a limited omniscient character can sometimes use a character
other than the protagonist (e.g. Vernon Dursley in SS/PS chapter one)
or report events without revealing the thoughts of any characters
<snipped>


> adi responded:
>   I agree with what you most of the time but I have some problem
with this 'limited' omniscient view. How come JKR'S view is limited?
After all she is the creator, she knows everything about these
characters that is there to know and what she doesn't know doesn't
exist either, the world she created doesn't exist outside her,
independently. So 
> how come her omniscience is 'limited'? It's complete and total. <snip>
Adi, who is somewhat petrified by carol's technical mastery
>   
Carol responds:

I didn't invent the term "limited omniscient." It's a technical term
from literary criticism. The first step in understanding it is to
distinguish between the author, who creates the story and is therefore
"omniscient" regarding it, and the narrator, the voice she uses to
tell the story. An author chooses a narrator (or narrative strategy)
as he or she chooses the names of the characters or the color of their
hair, but the narrator is much more important because it involves the
way the story is told, both the voice and the perspective.

The second step is to understand that a narrator can be fully
omniscient (in essence, the author's own voice or an aspect of the
author's personality) or partly omniscient--able to enter some
character's minds but not others. The idea is that the author can
*choose* to limit the narrator's omniscience, as JKR has done. If she
had chosen a fully omniscient narrator, we would know Peter
Pettigrew's thoughts or Dudley's or anyone else's that the author
wanted to reveal. But by choosing a *limited* omniscient narrator, she
deliberately limits us to the perspective of a few chosen characters,
usually but not always Harry, and the character's perspective shapes
the way we interpret the action. She can also choose to change the
narrative perspective to one in which there's no POV character, as she
does in the Godric's Hollow scene or parts of SS/PS chapter 1. Most of
the time, she *chooses* to limit both the narrator and the reader to
Harry's perspective, which, as I said in my original post, has
advantages and disadvantages.

Technically, the narrator of the Little Hangleton scene in GoF is an
objective narrator, who reports the action or historical background
without entering any character's mind, but it's simpler to think of it
as the same limited omniscient narrator who has stepped for the moment
outside Harry's POV. (The narrative voice is different--more distant
and authoritative. I imagine she'll use this perspective for the
epilogue that wraps up the lives of the surviving characters in Book 7.)

Why didn't JKR choose this narrative strategy throughout the book? Why
not have the narrator know and reveal everything? In part, it's to
maintain the mystery in every book. In part, it's so we learn along
with Harry who he is and what his powers are. In part, it's to conceal
the motives of the other characters from us. (Think how different
Snape would be if we knew where he went and what he did at the end of
GoF, or if we entered his thoughts when he confronted Harry about the
Marauders' Map in PoA.) In part, having the narrator's perspective
filtered through Harry (most of the time) brings us closer to Harry.
Would we care about him as much if the whole story were told the way
chapter 1 of GoF is? I don't think we would.

And think how different it would be as well if the narrator were Harry
(first-person participant point of view) and he were telling his own
story like Jane Eyre or David Copperfield. maybe we would be as close
to him as we are to them (if we like them), but it would be a
different sort of closeness.

Anyway, the point is simply that the narrator is not the author, and
JKR, as author, has chosen to limit her narrator's omniscience.

Carol, who used to teach composition and literature to college
students and enjoys putting her PhD to use again!