Fiction
The most useful question you can ask of any novel: who is telling me this, how much do they know, and how much do I trust them?
Narration: the central question
Everything you are told in a novel comes through somebody. Identifying who, and with what limitations, is the foundation of nearly every fiction answer.
First person
The narrator is a character. You know only what they know, and you are exposed to their bias. Always ask: is this narrator reliable? Where the reader can see more than the narrator does, that gap is the novel's chief instrument.
Third person limited
The narration follows one character's perspective. Other characters are seen from outside, which shapes sympathy powerfully. Ask whose mind you are inside, and — just as important — whose you are kept out of.
Third person omniscient
The narrator may enter any mind and comment freely. Ask what the narrating voice is like: sympathetic, ironic, detached, judging. An omniscient narrator is a character too.
Shifting narration
Where a novel changes narrator or perspective, that change is an argument. Ask what each perspective can see that the others cannot.
Terms worth having
- Focalisation
- Whose perspective the narration adopts at a given moment, which may differ from who is speaking.
- Example: A third-person narrator may focalise through a child, so that the reader understands what the child does not.
- Free indirect style
- Third-person narration that takes on a character's own words and idiom without quotation marks.
- Example: It lets a narrator be inside and outside a character at once, and is often the vehicle for irony. Being able to identify it accurately is a genuine mark of advanced reading.
- Unreliable narrator
- A narrator whose account the reader is invited to doubt.
- Example: The evidence is usually internal: contradictions, over-insistence, gaps, or a version of events that the other characters' behaviour does not support.
- Analepsis and prolepsis
- Flashback and flash-forward.
- Example: Ask why the information is placed here rather than in chronological order. Usually the answer is irony or suspense.
- Duration and pace
- How much text is given to how much time.
- Example: Ten pages on one afternoon and one sentence on ten years is a statement about what matters in this novel.
- Setting as meaning
- Place and period doing argumentative work, not scene-setting.
- Example: A house that becomes harder to heat as the family's fortunes fall is not description; it is the theme, made physical.
- Motif
- A recurring image, object or phrase that accumulates meaning through repetition.
- Example: Trace where a motif appears. Its meaning at the end is rarely its meaning at the start.
Handling a long text in an examination
You cannot quote widely from a novel under pressure, and you should not try. What you need is a small set of precisely located moments.
For each theme and each main character, fix three moments — early, middle and late. Three moments across the book let you argue about development, which is what higher marks reward. A single moment, however well analysed, cannot show change.
Precise reference is worth as much as quotation. When she refuses the money at the railway station is eight words and demonstrates command of the text. At one point in the novel demonstrates the opposite.
The two commonest failures
- Narrating instead of arguing. Every paragraph should open with a claim. If a paragraph opens with an event, rewrite the opening sentence.
- Treating characters as people rather than as constructions. She should not have married him is a moral opinion. The novel arranges our sympathies so that we understand the marriage while regretting it is literary criticism.