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98 Part II: Realising That Character Is Everything
We shall halt here, before Mrs Fussbudget sips her tea, and the motes of
dust are still in the air, to consider now what we have learned about the
wicked Mr Nogoodnik.
—William Makepeace Thackeray (Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero,
Penguin Classics, 2001, first published 1847–8)
In War and Peace (1869), Tolstoy even takes out whole chapters from the
story to expound upon his philosophy of history.
Nowadays, this kind of thing sounds very old-fashioned and so is best avoided.
However, every rule is made to be broken, and in Clive Barker’s 2007 novel
Mister B. Gone the story begins and ends with the narrator, a devil, asking
readers to ‘burn this book’!
Five third-person narrative styles
Within a third-person narration you can have a huge range of distance
between the narrator – and therefore the reader – and the characters, from
being right outside the characters to being right inside them. Here are your
options:
✓ A completely external viewpoint, where the characters are seen only
from the outside, and their thoughts and feelings are unknown to the
narrator:
On a cold morning on 7th January 1966, a young girl in a red
dress stepped out of a house in Mayfair and climbed into a cab.
After waiting a few moments, the cab drove off and turned into
Piccadilly, heading west.
✓ A traditional omniscient narration where the narrator can enter into the
thoughts and feelings of the characters:
On a cold January morning in 1966, Amanda Haycroft stepped
anxiously out of her house in Mayfair and climbed into the cab,
where the driver had been waiting with increasing irritation. She
hesitated for some moments before telling him her destination. She
was dreading her sister’s wedding in Chelsea.
✓ A third-person limited narration where only one character’s thoughts
and feelings are entered into at any one time (note: the narrative voice
remains the author’s):