Third person limited omniscient
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The third person limited omniscient is a narrative mode. In this mode, the reader and writer observe the situation from the outside through the senses and thoughts of a single character, although that focal character may shift throughout the course of any given narrative. Furthermore, there is no implied fictional intermediary between the reader and the story, as there would be in the case of a fictional newspaper article with an implied fictional reporter.
Although first person fictional narratives are popular as well, the third person is seen as the current preferred voice in fiction, with the prominent exception of most detective and some police procedural novels.
While an omniscient point of view can change viewpoint characters instantly, the limited omniscient point of view narrative limits narration to what can be known, seen, thought, or judged from a single character's perspective. Thus, the narration is limited in the same way a first person narrative might be, but the text is in third person.
Henry James, who used the third person limited omniscient narrative in his novel The Ambassadors and coined the phrase "effaced narration" to describe it, believed this could create high art, and contemporary literary writers seem to agree. The effaced narrator dominates contemporary literary art. James pointed out that in effaced narration, the art consisted of varying the reader's psychological distance from the action, bringing the reader in close for high drama, and further out for ordinary events.
[edit] Example
Murgatroyd met Madeline on New Year's Eve in 2002. He attended a party and she opened the door. Her hair, he thought, my God her hair! Only a goddess could have hair so fine.
The alert reader will notice that the final sentence is in the mind of the character, yet is not identified as a thought. The style has become psychologically close.
An omniscient narrator might then report on Madeline's thoughts or events in Beijing, but in effaced narration we stay with Murgatroyd. In this way, the writer is forced to be artful to supply a reader with all that must be known while keeping the experience of reading to be closer to how we in fact experience life--through a single pair of eyes, a single set of ears, one mind, etc.
