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

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 107359

I (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.<

Carol responds:
Me? I'm not inventing a fictitious narrator. I'm just pointing out her
use of a common literary straegy. See below.
 
Del replied (to adi):
>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.

Carol responds:
Interesting analogy! But, of course, the strategy works better with a
novel than a football game. An author generally has good reasons for
wanting us to watch only that one "player" (character)--and unlike
your commentator, to see through that "player's" eyes. (And good
reasons to occasionally shift the focus to another "player.")
> 
Del:
> 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.

Carol responds:
I can think of two places where he does seem to know things that Harry
(or the current POV character) doesn't: Chapter 1 and the first
paragraph of chapter 2 in SS/PS and the first chapter of GoF. But
again, it's the author's privilege to switch narrative strategies
where and when it suits her. (There's also the minor instance of
knowing that Neville is lying awake that I've mentioned before and
another minor instance early in OoP of knowing what a Put-Outer is
when Harry doesn't. These can be regarded as authorial slips or as
deliberate choices; either way, they're deviations from the pattern
that jump out at someone like me who notices narrative technique.)

Del: 
> 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 :-)


Carol responds:
Actually, you did a very good job of presenting the concept of limited
omniscience from a nontechnical perspective. I just have a few
additions or clarifications of my previous post, which I hope will
make the concept more intelligible. Again, I didn't invent any of
this. It's stuff you learn when you major in literature and then go on
to grad school for yet more literary analysis.

An author has essentially five types of narrator to choose from:
first-person participant (uses "I" to tell the story and is a main
character), first-person spectator (uses "I" to tell the story but is
a minor character), third-person omniscient (uses "he"/"she" and can
get inside any character's mind; often indistinguishable from the
author's own voice), third-person limited omniscient (uses "he"/"she";
can get inside the mind of a single character or a very few
characters), and third-person objective/dramatic (uses "he"/"she";
sees characters from the outside only).

Narrative strategy is a stylistic device, just as choosing to write in
dialect was a stylistic device for Mark Twain in "Huckleberry Finn"
(who also *chose* a first-person participant naive narrator who
obviously isn't himself).

Basically, there are things JKR doesn't want us to know--like what
happened at Godric's Hollow or why Snape left the DEs or what's up
with Percy--and by limiting the narrator's knowledge, she limits our
knowledge as well.

I suggest that anyone who's confused by the concept look closely at
the narrative strategies used by various well-known authors (Hemingway
vs. Tolstoy?). Melville's "Moby Dick," one of my favorite books,
starts out with a first-person narrator (Ishmael) who's somewhere
between a spectator and participant, but later in the book, Melville
experiments with other narrative strategies for scenes that Ishmael
can't possibly overhear, including a soliloquy by Starbuck that's set
up like a scene from a play and another scene involving Starbuck using
third-person limited so that we can know Starbuck's thoughts (as
Ishmael can't unless he's eavesdropping and Starbuck is thinking out
loud). Or take a look at Dickens' "Bleak House," which alternates a
naive first-person narrator (Esther) with an unnamed third-person
objective narrator, who presents the detective story elements of the
novel. These narrators have distinctive voices, neither of which is
Dickens' own (which you can "hear" by reading his letters).

Or how about "The Hobbit" vs. "Lord of the Rings," both of which can
be considered third-person limited because Tolkien limits himself to
the point of view of the hobbits but which are written in very
different "voices"--a cheerful, avuncular narrator talking to children
(in "Hobbit") and a more distant and impersonal narrator relating the
story to adult readers from a particular hobbit's perspective without
being personally involved (in LOTR). (I could go on about how Tolkien
varies his narrative voice with the relative dignity of the scene and
characters present, but I don't want to go OT.) The main point is that
a narrator is a persona that the author adopts, not the author
"speaking" in his or her own voice.

Think how different the books would be if an omniscient narrator
sometimes followed Hagrid around and filtered the action and dialogue
through his perspective, giving us background on his life with his dad
after his mother left and what he went through at Azkaban, for
example, then shifted to Hermione and the classes she attends without
Harry for a chapter, and then moved on to to Snape or Dumbledore--or
left Hogwarts altogether to explore Fudge or Percy at the MoM? How
about the POV of Professor Binns? Would it even be possible to get
inside the head of a ghost? And how interesting would it be if the
narrator could? And would knowing all those perspectives help us at
all unless a so-called "intrusive omniscient narrator" interpreted
them for us and told us what to think? I for one hate it when a
narrator does that. (I also find it jarring when a first-person
narrator addresses the reader: "Reader, I married him!" Love the book.
Hate the line. But I digress.)

As I said before, I didn't make up these terms and concepts, though
unfortunately the terminology and definitions have not been
standardized and vary slightly from source to source. But any literary
critic will take it for granted that authors *choose* a narrative
strategy (a narrative voice and a point of view) based on how much
they want the reader to know and how close they want the connection
between the reader and particular characters to be. And JKR is no
exception. I, for one, am glad she chose a limited omniscient
narrator, which is far and away the best narrative strategy for this
book, IMHO.

Carol, hoping she hasn't confused you even more (or bored you, which
would be worse!)