Video: How to Identify Narrative Style in Literature

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Narrative style in literature refers to the storyteller or the narrator in a piece of writing, whether it be first, second or third person, omniscient or otherwise. Identify the narrative style of a piece of literature, while deciding whether or not to trust the narrator, with tips from a published author and English professor in this free video on writing.

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Video Transcript

What is narrative style in literature? It is not to be confused with prose style which is a choice of words but narrative style is the choice of who is going to be the narrator, who is going to tell the story? We have three basic modes, first person, second person, third person, just like our favorite pronouns. First person I tell the story, it is happening about me. In the second person not used very often, you read the story and you are the protagonist. The narrator will say you get out of bed, you go to the bathroom and so on. The most common is third person, he does this, she does that, we look in effect, over the shoulder of the character but we're not actually inside the character's head. We don't see it through his eyes but rather as I said over the shoulder. Now sometimes that's a very intimate third person and it can also be a very distant omniscient third person and an omniscient third person narrative, the narrator knows what's happening inside everybody's heads. The narrator knows everything that is going on and in an intimate third person we are looking over one person's shoulder and we know what that person knows but not the other stuff so for example in a mystery story you will commonly know what the detective knows but nothing else. If you knew everything already, it wouldn't be a mystery. The other problem that we have to deal with is whether we can trust the person who is telling the story. In most cases this is not much of an issue but in a few, especially good stories we can't believe what the narrator is telling us. In "Lolita" for example the narrator, Humbard Humbard tells us at the beginning he is a murderer and we know probably from the start we can't trust what he says. He is spinning everything to use a modern phrase to make himself look good. In the classic story "Rip Van Winkle" the first great American short story we know the story Rip goes up into the woods, into the hills, he sleeps for 20 years and by the wildest coincidence he comes back several days after the wife whom he hated terribly dies but if we look at the story carefully we realize he is lying. He is lying to us, specifically he is lying to Dedrick Knickerbacker who writes down the story and believes all of it and swears that it is true whose papers are then found by Washington Irving who is the actual author of the story but we can't understand the story completely until we understand that the narrator is lying to us.

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How to Identify Narrative Style in Literature

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