Writing Prompt (15 min)• Write a ghost story in which the narrator is a ghost.

Point of View

Henry James, “The House of Fiction”

Where you stand determines what you see.

Point of View

Whose eyes are we looking through? Whose central nervous system?

Narrators

Real People “God-Like”

Star WarsStand By Me

Narrative PowersOmniscient narrators can• Be invisible • Read characters’ minds• Know what will happen• Be trusted to tell the truthOmniscient narrators don’t have

names or lives.

A “real” person has to• Be there or be told• Make inferences or guesses• Only know after the fact• Can’t always be trustedReal people have names and lives

Kinds of Narrators

Real People Omniscient Narrators

First Person-Minor First Person-Major

Third Person Omniscient Editorially Omniscient

First Person-Major “I could picture it. I have a habit of imagining the conversations between my friends. We went out to the Cafe Napolitain to have an aperitif and watch the evening crowd on the Boulevard.”

First Person-MinorShe missed the bus. She'd probably spent an hour arguing with herself that she really should get up. I could picture her there, curled up in bed with the cat next to her. Now she was going to have to walk to work.

Third Person Omniscient“Margaret, the eldest of the four, was sixteen, and very pretty, being plump and fair, with large eyes, plenty of soft brown hair, a sweet mouth, and white hands, of which she was rather vain. Fifteen-year-old Jo was very tall, thin, and brown, and reminded one of a colt…Elizabeth, or Beth, as everyone called her, was a rosy, smooth-haired, bright-eyed girl of thirteen, with a shy manner, a timid voice, and a peaceful expression, which was seldom disturbed…”

Editorially OmniscientIf you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book. In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle. This is because not very many happy things happened in the lives of the three Baudelaire youngsters. Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire were intelligent children, and they were charming, and resourceful, and had pleasant facial features, but they were extremely unlucky, and most everything that happened to them was rife with misfortune, misery and despair. I’m sorry to tell you this, but that is how the story goes.

Practice with narrators• Rewrite any section of the story of the three little pigs with your

assigned narrator. The story should only be 50 words long.

First Person-Major as one of the pigsFirst Person-Major as the wolfFirst Person-Minor as someone who lived near the pigsThird Person Omniscient in the head of one of the pigsEditorially Omniscient — you love the wolfEditorially Omniscient — you hate the wolf