Book contents
6 - Perspective
from Part I - Parts of Prose
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2021
Summary
This chapter shows that the management of perspective in narrative fiction is a matter of technique at the level of the sentence, involving diction, syntax and punctuation. Ruth Bernard Yeazell distinguishes different varieties of perspective available in fiction (third person, first person, free indirect style) and shows how they work in practice. Her suggestion that the familiar but misleading concept of the ‘omniscient narrator’ emerges from ‘confusing the power theoretically open to novelists from the actual behavior of novelists’ indicates the benefits of attending to examples of prose in practice.
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- The Cambridge Companion to Prose , pp. 96 - 111Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021