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

[jelly92784]

No: HPFGUIDX 107295

> Del wrote :
> 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.

Coming from a current lit major, I really like your analogy, the only 
thing that is slightly different is that the commentator does not 
have the ability to read the players' minds whereas the narrator can 
at times, this is of course where the limited omniscience thing comes 
in which decides which characters' minds he can read and when, it is 
JKR's role to determine what the narrator sees.  The narrator is not 
a character in this case, just a story-teller.
Janelle