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www.ATIBOOK.irFiction 119We call the first two positions external narration, and the third internal narration. Anequivalent set of terms would describe (1) and (2) as external focalisation and (3) ascharacter focalisation. Focalisation implies a camera position. As the writer, you have achoice. You can stand away from the characters and observe them as a group, move closeto the characters, occupy their viewing positions, move back to a distance. Even thirdperson‘she/he/they narrative’ can look through the eyes of a character and show us whatthey see. As readers, our sympathy is usually reserved for those characters whoseviewing positions we are allowed to occupy, and withheld from those we are not. Hencethe writer can manipulate the direction of our sympathy. In the story above it goestowards the nurses and the foetus, and away from Miss Hay ward.Phrases such as ‘he/she saw/felt/wondered’ begin the shift from straightforwardexternal narration where the reader is addressed directly and given external informationabout scenes and characters. But when we hear a character’s own reactions in his or herown words, we know that the shift is complete. Writers do not necessarily use theseterms, but they do understand when a shift needs to occur.In ‘No Legal Existence’ the first sentence shows us the nurses, while the second showsus Phyllis, each externally. The writer here is addressing the reader directly. But we soonrealise that we are in the same position as Phyllis, that of a nurse ‘peering over [theothers’] shoulders’. We are not seeing what’s there until Phyllis sees it, and, like her, wedon’t understand quite what it is we are looking at. When we get to: ‘It didn’t look a bitlike a baby’, this statement is clearly Phyllis’s opinion, and is addressed internally toherself. These words are what Phyllis is actually thinking as she looks down at theplacenta in the bowl. The shift is complete, and from then on we get her and the nurses’reactions, but mainly Phyllis’s, in a second-by-second close-up record of response.In the final seconds of the action, the closing shot pauses to outline the lid on thehospital bin. We know, now, why bins have soft lids. The story structure has moved fromexternal narration to internal and finally back to external, and this device reinforces oursense that the story has reached a conclusion. The story is shaped partly by these switchesin narrative position, and partly by the fact that the object of focus—the baby—has nowdisappeared.In third-person narrative it is very important to realise that you do possess this cinemalikepower of attention to a scene and its characters; you can make decisions about whereyou stand, what you see, what you choose not to see, or which character’s vision toinhabit. You can therefore become the story’s director, deciding the angles of shots, thedegree of distance and close-up, and make use of pausing slow-motion effects, montageand flashback. Your readers will see what you decide to let them, and hear what you wantthem to hear.If you decide to use a first-person ‘I—narrator’, then this ‘I’ will be occupying thesame scene as the story characters and interacting with them. ‘I’ will be one of thecharacters.But in some cases, the ‘I’ may not interact, and may observe without being part of thestory. In the following passage by V.S. Pritchett, ‘I’ shows just enough hint of attitude tocharacterise him, but not enough to cause him to interfere:In a dead place like this town you always had to wait I was waiting for atrain, now I had to wait for a haircut….