How Fiction Works

In literature, third person omniscience and first person narrator, are the most common and better options when it comes to narration, since they best resemble it, while others become closer to what we know as poetry or prose poetry. In ‘How Fiction Works’, James Wood describes the reliability of these two different types of narration, finally suggesting that first person narration is more reliable than third person omniscient narration.

Wood suggests that the unreliability of first-person narrators is actually quite reliable, setting as an example the respective narrators of Jane Eyre and The Remains of the Day. In both cases, there is a process of ‘authorial flagging’, where the novel teaches the reader how to read its narrator. However, first person narration is actually quite biased (thus unreliable). It only conveys one character’s point of view throughout the novel, which in some cases, although rare, can be very unreliable ‘genuinely mysterious bottomless characters’. For example the unknowable narrator of Hamsun’s ‘Hunger’, or the psychoanalysed life Zeno Cosini narrates. First person narration does not offer the reader the range of thought the third person narration does. With third person omniscient, the author enables the reader to understand several characters. Wood argues against the benefits of omniscient narration by suggesting that it is an ‘authorial style’ where the writer tries to almost impress his readers with ‘exquisite sentences and details, which are nothing less than God’s showy signatures on every page’.

Wood continues this chapter by commenting on ‘free indirect style’, term used to describe the omniscience of a narrator, and how the narrative ‘floats away from the novelist and takes on the properties of the cahracter, who now seems to own the words’. With Free Indirect Style, we the readers, are able to see and understand things through the character’s eyes and language, and at the same time that of the author’s.

In ‘The Road’, Cormac McCarthy uses free indirect speech, as well as an undefined third person omniscient narrator. The third person narration and the free indirect style applied in ‘The Road’ allows the creation of an even darker atmosphere from that already existent. The destruction and misery of the character’s lives can be experienced and seen by both of them, father and son,  also providing a detailed account of the setting from the author. This allows the reader to have a vast comprehension of the apocalyptic nature of the world created by McCarthy.