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

[delwynmarch]

No: HPFGUIDX 107239


carol wrote:
> Anyway, the point is simply that the narrator is not the author, and
> JKR, as author, has chosen to limit her narrator's omniscience.
 
adi answered :
> If the narrator is indeed different from the author, wouldn't it 
> raise the question of who it is? 
> You see, you are inventing a fictitious narrator, giving life to the 
> third person vein that the books are told from. I don't think the 
> narrator at least in this case is different from the author.

Del replies :
I am not a lit major, but I know enough about writing to answer anyway.

It's an author's privilege to decide who is going to tell the story.
It can be the author herself, one of the characters, or a narrator
that has nothing to do with the story.

Think of it as a commentator at a football game : he's not one of the
players, but he's not God either. He's not involved in the match, but
he doesn't know anything about what is going to happen. Moreover, he
can only watch one thing at a time, so if he decided to concentrate on
only one player throughout the whole game, we would know only what
that player did and what the other players who are interacting with
him did.

It's the same with a limited omniscient narrator. Basically, JKR has
gone and fetched some guy (I chose a guy so as not to confuse with her
in my explanations) who doesn't know anything about Harry or the WW at
first, and has asked him to be the narrator of her story. She
arbitrarily (author's privilege) decided that he should tell things
from Harry's point of view as often as possible, but she allowed him
to change the point of view if necessary. So now she's playing her
story in front of that guy and he's telling us what he sees. He is not
one of the characters, he doesn't play any role in the story, but he's
not the author either, because he doesn't know the whole story : he
discovers it along with us. He doesn't know what is going to happen,
this is the author's strict privilege. She *could* decide to share
some information with the narrator if she wanted to, but I can't
remember anywhere in the books where the narrator seems to know things
he can't possibly know just by watching the story happen.

I don't know if that helped, and I still hope Carol is going to give
her own answer, especially if I got anything wrong :-)

Del