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6 - Perspective

from Part I - Parts of Prose

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2021

By
Ruth Bernard Yeazell
Edited by
Daniel Tyler
Daniel Tyler
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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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.

Keywords

perspectiveomnisciencefirst personnarrationfree indirect styleDickensAustenJamesWoolf
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to Prose , pp. 96 - 111
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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