Omniscient narrator

An omniscient narrator tells a story from a perspective that can extend beyond any single character, reporting events and multiple characters’ thoughts.

Narrative point of view: The position and perspective from which a story’s events are presented. Omniscient narration is one way a story can organize its point of view.
Limited third-person narration: Third-person narration restricted largely to one character’s perceptions, knowledge, or thoughts. Unlike this restricted mode, an omniscient narrator can report beyond one character’s awareness.
Narrator: The voice or agent that presents a narrative to an audience. Omniscience describes a narrator’s scope of knowledge, not the narrator’s identity.
Middlemarch: George Eliot’s 1871–72 novel follows intertwined lives in the English provincial town of Middlemarch. Its narrator moves among characters’ inner lives and connects them to a broad social picture.
Narrative distance: The perceived closeness between a narrator’s telling and a character’s experience or thoughts. An omniscient narrator can move between intimate access to minds and detached overview.
First-person narrative: A narrative told by a character or speaker using first-person pronouns. A first-person speaker is situated within the story, unlike the usual perspective beyond its characters.
Focalization: The selection and restriction of information in a narrative according to a perspective. A narrator may know broadly while a passage remains focused through one character.
War and Peace: Leo Tolstoy’s novel follows Russian families during the Napoleonic Wars and examines history, society, and war. Its wide-ranging narration moves between private experience and historical events.
Narratorial intrusion: An explicit interruption of a story by its narrator to comment, judge, or address an audience. An omniscient narrator may step beyond events to offer judgments or general observations.
Objective narration: Narration that reports observable actions and speech while withholding direct access to characters’ thoughts. Omniscient narration can disclose private thoughts that objective narration leaves unreported.

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