Who's telling the story?

[Ritual]

Has anybody ever considered the narrative source (or whatever I should call it) in books? I mean, you get told a story, but whose story? Who is actually telling this story? I used to never think about it and just accepted the omniscient "author" as the source of the story, but then I heard a TV show about litterature where they discussed Brett Easton Ellis (the guy who wrote American Psycho). In that show they discussed a lot of the criticism that has been directed at Ellis from all sorts of directions and one of these criticisms was that you didn't know who was telling the story about Patric Bateman in American Psycho. Thus, the critcs meant, you didn't know how to put the things told in perspective. I don't know how important this really is but it got me thinking about it when reading books ever since that.

Some books are written in a first person perspective and then it's fairly easy to understand that everything that is told is viewed from that character's perspective. I recently started reading George R.R. Martin's Songs of Fire and Ice series and that (for those who haven't read it, and to those I also recommend it strongly) is divided into chapters where each chapter is told from one character's point of view. Thus, some incidents are told from different angles, which is very interesting.

How do you perceive books that are written from an omniscient point of view, then? In a way these books can be somewhat problematic, since we get told what happens in a very matter-of-fact way, and we also get told how characters respond to this and what emotions they have, but we don't get to see things how they see it. Is that a problem, do you think? I don't know, really, but it's something I have started thinking about and I would like to hear some thoughts about this.

[Nathan Caroland]

Hrmmm, never thought of this to be honest, particularly it the amount of books I read.

For the most part, everything I read is first person, or at the very least, third person where someone is telling the story of someone else and I find that I prefere these two types of books and is probably one of the reasons why I don't go for the omni-perspective ones much.

I've read a few of them (I'm scratching and digging trying to bring up a name) and generally don't find myself too concerned with who's perspective it is coming from and have just taken it as 'just is'.

Now I'm curious if this will color my view when I read the next book like that.

[Mclimbin]

I tend to like stories that are told from a clear perspective too. The Omniscient Narrator tends to perpetuate our cultural fallacy that there is an objective truth out there. I don't really see the world in that way, so books that are told from a specific point of view are just more interesting to me.

A book can be written in the third person but still from one point of view. I just finished the first two books of Robin Hobb's new series (a fabulously beautiful, depressing and dark work, btw), which are written in the third person but still are written with the protagonist's point of view in mind. That is, you don't really know what anyone else is thinking, just the protagonist. I think this works well too, and it's a little less disorienting than GRR Martin's style (which I love too, but it can be disorienting a little, especially at the beginning).

As for GRR Martin, I'd be happy if everything was told from Arya's point of view. She's my favorite character, I'd (almost) be happy to just read her chapters and no one else's. Almost is the key word, though. :)

Interesting topic. :)