Narration: What Is It and What Types Are There?

What Is Narration?

Its purpose is therefore to convey the plot of a work to readers and present its fictional world. A narrator, meanwhile, is a fictional person created by the author to describe the course of the action.

The way a story is conveyed affects how the work is understood and interpreted later, which is why the narrator’s construction should match the style of the prose.

The Most Popular Types of Narration in Prose

Traditional classifications of narration usually distinguish between three types, which differ in the grammatical form they use:

• first-person narration,
• second-person narration,
• third-person narration.

Depending on the type of narration chosen, the narrator may have more or less knowledge about events and may sometimes be one of the novel’s characters.

First-Person Narration

This gives readers access to the character’s emotions, feelings and thoughts, allowing them to find themselves at the very centre of the events—something that is often missing from other types of storytelling. However, reality is always presented subjectively, without access to the thoughts of other characters.

First-person narration is most often found in works written as memoirs or diaries, but it is also used in contemporary fiction, crime novels, fantasy and other genres.

In this form of narration, the author may use the present tense (“I leave the house and start looking around”) or the past tense (“I was so tired that I fell asleep after a few minutes”). First-person narration in the past tense appears, for example, in Charles Bukowski’s novel Women, while Suzanne Collins uses the present tense in The Hunger Games.

Second-Person Narration

This approach draws the reader into the plot, even though they do not know where it is heading and cannot discover the emotions of the other characters.

This is the least frequently used type of narration, usually chosen for short forms such as short stories. It was used, among others, by Victor Pelevin in The Ontology of Childhood.

Third-Person Narration

This makes it possible to provide broader context—characters’ thoughts are often conveyed through free indirect discourse, and the narrator’s knowledge does not have to be limited to the main character.

Third-person narration makes it easier to give the action momentum and allows sudden changes of location or time in order to present the experiences of other characters. In such novels, readers can learn the fate of every character while also maintaining some distance from the events, receiving only an external account.

Authors use the past tense in third-person narration, as in Agatha Christie’s crime novel Murder on the Orient Express, or the present tense, as in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall.

How Can You Identify Different Types of Narrators?

In addition to the types of narration listed above, classified according to person, there are other systems in which narrators are classified according to their knowledge and the function they perform in a novel. How do these types differ?

The Narrator and Their Knowledge

Based on the narrative voice’s level of knowledge, works of prose may feature:

• an omniscient narrator—someone with unlimited knowledge of events who knows the unspoken thoughts of all the characters, is familiar with the past and future, and comments on and evaluates events, as in Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace;
• a limited narrator—someone connected to one or more selected characters, whose knowledge is restricted to them, as in George Orwell’s 1984.

The Narrator and Their Role in the Novel

Depending on the function the narrative voice performs in a work, three types of narrators can be identified:

• a first-person narrator—an active participant in the action who tells the story from their own perspective;
• a personal narrator—someone who presents the story through the eyes of a single character who is not the narrative voice, as in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice;
• an authorial narrator—someone who tells the story as a commentator or observer who does not participate in the events but comments on them, as in George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

Other Types of Narration

Besides the basic types of narration used in prose, authors also employ less common forms.

One interesting technique is behavioural narration, which is limited to presenting what can be observed from the outside, without examining the character’s emotions. The narrator therefore describes the characters’ gestures, speech and behaviour objectively. This style can be found, for example, in Ernest Hemingway’s short story Hills Like White Elephants.

Some novels also use epistolary narration, which consists of presenting letters, diaries or other documents. In this case, this first-person material guides the reader through the plot. This type is usually combined with another form of narration, as in Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Another type is collective narration, in which the story is told by a collective voice (“we”), such as an entire community or group of characters rather than a single narrator. This type of storytelling appears in Zoo Station: The Story of Christiane F. by Christiane F.

Another intriguing option is stream-of-consciousness narration, which presents a character’s inner thoughts and emotions in a chaotic way, often without clear logic or punctuation, to reflect the natural flow of thought. It appears, for example, in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.

Which Type of Narration Should You Choose?

In crime novels, where events need to be presented from different perspectives, an omniscient third-person narrator may be a good choice. In contemporary fiction, where the characters’ emotions and thoughts are more important, first-person narration or a personal narrator may work better.

Writers often do not choose a single narrative model but combine several types in one work, creating so-called mixed narration or opting for multiple narrators. This makes it much easier to present a story from different perspectives while maintaining a distinctive style.