Omniscient narration: What type of god is this?

Points of View

For centuries, omniscient was the point of view for storytelling. A narrator acted as outside observer, telling the reader what happened (and happened is the right tense here – third person past tense was the typical view), when, and why.

Now, that classical tone is growing rare, with many authors (and publishers) preferring first-person or third-person limited and many claiming that omniscient perspective is on life support. But can you really kill a God(like perspective)? And are we even sure what type of God we are killing?

In this essay, I’ll explore the omniscient perspective and why I think it might be more helpful, for the modern writer at least, to think of their omniscient narrator, if they are choosing to use one, of being one God in a pantheon, more Greek or Norse trickster toying with humans. Can an omniscient narrator really know everything, and how much of what they know should they show?

Different points of view

While it is possible to broadly identify advantages of different points of view (first person gives a conversational-feeling intimacy and almost stream of consciousness potential, third person limited allows character depth and voice to come to the fore with a bit less sense of claustrophobia than first, omniscient can support the greatest scope and depth across multiple characters), ultimately the question comes down to author preference. What feels right to you for the characters and story that you want to tell?

If that seems vague and unhelpful, it shouldn’t. It should actually be liberating. Because there doesn’t have to be a right answer. In fact many of the greatest authors, like Susanna Clarke or Peter Carey, can master multiple perspectives. What’s vital is that the chosen perspective fits the story. In Clarke’s case, Piranesi’s first-person narrator works beautifully to reinforce the character’s cloudy knowledge, the way they have learned to live within the walls of the house, while in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, the omniscient narrator allows the scope of the magical world, both sides of the conflict between Strange and Norrell to be explored. As long as the author knows why they’re telling a story the way they are, then they can lean in to the advantages of their perspective and at the same time mitigate some of its challenges. A good first-person novel can find ways to convey scope. A good omniscient novel can create depth in other ways.

There’s a strong argument that omniscient narration is the hardest point of view to get right. There are two reasons for that. The first is that it simply offers the most possibilities, the most negative space. When presented with all the options of omniscience, access to the whole world, its entire population, and all their thoughts and decisions, the narrator must consider not just what to include, but what to exclude.

And what to exclude is simply much greater than it is when writing in first-person or third-person limited. In The Hunger Games (a poster child for the first-person present voice that’s come to dominate YA), Katniss Everdeen has no idea that there’s a revolution on in The Hunger Games? Great, all that outside stuff can be ignored until she is thrust to its centre. Let the problem start personal, the combat feel immediate and intimate (first person present is a natural fit for this reason) then grow later. The reader can see the same hints she does, can share her shock when she emerges as the centrepiece of something much bigger than her. As an experiment, let’s now think about how The Hunger Games might look if it were written in the omniscient style? How much would we see of the revolution? How much more human would Coriolanus Snow be? How much would we need to see of Peeta? The better question is if we did see more of these people, would that actually make the novel more effective? Arguably not. The story requires Katniss to feel frustrated, to feel alone and angry, for the reader to share her at times one-note scorn for the villains and then see only when she does how the unscrupulous can use that anger. Something like Harry Potter operates the same way in the third person, albeit in a slightly softer way. We know Harry is a wizard before he does, but we only learn of, for example, the prophecy at the same time he does, so we get to experience his teenage angst in all its force as he is left out of the loop by Dumbledore. The tragic power of The Remains of the Day is that the reader comes to see, as the first-person narrator cannot bring himself to, just how wasted his life has been, a power that would have been lost had an omniscient narrator told the story in a different order or made Steven’s failings more explicit.

Think of The Lord of The Rings. We aren’t immediately told about the war for the ring from a distance, of Gollum escaping and Sauron rebuilding his power. We learn these things with Frodo, as Frodo in the sense of how time passes and how troubling it all feels. Even though the narrator (who we know is writing with hindsight) could tell us these things as Gandalf when he finds them out or even without Gandalf’s help at all, as a detached all-knowing entity, he doesn’t. As an interesting aside, when thinking of which character to put in focus at a given moment if you are using an omniscient narrator, it is often more interesting to focus on the character doing the learning rather than the character imparting wisdom. The reader naturally feels more kinship for Frodo than Gandalf in this scene, because we, like Frodo are hearing these things for the first time. So too when Strider is introduced, the reader is tricked into thinking him an ominous presence in the corner. Frodo’s impression of him matters more than his essence. So we learn his identity no sooner than Frodo. An omniscient narrator peeking out behind the curtain to tell us that Strider is actually good, is actually the heir to the throne of Gondor, even that he will ultimately, at our saga’s conclusion become King of Gondor, would weaken the story.

Aside 1: What does the fox say? The joy of vignettes

One of the great advantages of omniscient narration is the vignette, a little aside where the narrator shows us something often not perceived by one of our main focus characters. There’s a famous instance in The Fellowship of the Ring, where, straight off the back of describing Frodo fearing no danger, Tolkien takes the reader very briefly into the mind of a fox, in a manner more reminiscent of The Hobbit than the rest of The Lord of the Rings. The effect is to remind the reader (even in quite a jarring way) of how much wider the scope of the story is than the omniscient narrator can possibly relay.  Louis de Bernieres and Evelyn Waugh are masters of this little random aside, good examples of how vignettes can support both comedy and tragedy while making the world feel slightly larger.

Showing too much

The most common mistake I see in omniscient narrated manuscripts is writers forgetting that an omniscient narrator can allow themselves, for storytelling purposes, to put the focus on a character who knows less than they do. They fall, in other words into the trap of trying to show too much, of thinking that even if a narrator knows everything, there is an obligation to share everything with the reader. If a tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound? Well, an omniscient narrator could technically answer this question, but, unless that sound is going to have some important impact down the line, arguably they shouldn’t tell us. So much should they tell us?

Good omniscient writing uses its broad knowledge only in pursuit of all the things that create a good story, to be reductive that is conflict, mystery, suspense. It does so in service of irony or dramatic irony. It offers clarity where clarity is needed and retains mystery or ambiguity where that supports the story (this distinction is the subject for another time). It picks its camera position to deliver the most engaging, emotional journey for the reader.

An omniscient narrator might defend its characters or it might send them up for our amusement, or it might highlight their evil. It is not in that sense an objective narrator. It will by necessity choose an approach, but that approach has to help it tell a good story, keeping readers immersed, avoiding that sensation of being yanked by the neck and dragged out of a carefully conjured setting. It has to avoid, in other words, head hopping.

This infuriatingly intangible concept is often a cause of consternation to writers, and the short answer is that the distinction really just comes down to a sense of how well the changes in focus (the access to different minds and different people’s perceptions) support the story. Do they increase the conflict or comedy (a la P.G. Wodehouse creating all sorts of miscommunications in Blandings) or do they reduce it?

There are writers who have made head hopping work. Dune, by Frank Herbert is a classic example. Stephen King is another oft-cited name. Lonesome Dove, beloved first of the Pulitzer Prize judges and now by BookTok, does it too apparently (it’s on my TBR pile). I point these out to show that, like most “rules” in writing, there are exceptions. To quote Master Yoda, “only a Sith deals in absolutes”. But that doesn’t mean we should simply ignore the reality of publishing (where head hopping is frowned upon) and the impact of narrative decisions. Most of the time, head hopping does detract from a story. Getting it right is possible, but it needs to have a purpose (Herbert for instance is contrasting all sorts of Machiavellian motivations going on in individual scenes – the depth and complexity of which matters), and it needs to be incredibly well handled.

There are techniques that can help here, most centring on providing either physical space (a paragraph break at least, often a chapter break) or changing the narrative distance more gradually, separating characters’ thoughts with dialogue, description, or physical cues rather than just leaping from one mind into another. If you’re crossing a motorway, at least pause in the central reservation. But even better, find a bridge.

Note here that head hopping is not the same as multiple or rotating limited points of view. Game of Thrones or Homegoing for instance show the limited points of view of multiple characters but do so one character at a time, clearly delineated. And in each section, the narrator perceives only what one character perceives. The narrator cannot break out of that character’s knowledge to foreshadow or to compare to the generations that have gone before. The reader can see those things, but the narrator doesn’t pull back the curtain to make the comparisons clear. The tone of each section consequently shifts as well, reflecting that character’s class, role, education mood, experience, motivation, tightening the narrative distance. Vocabulary choices, sentence cadence, the way time passes – these things shift. Whereas with omniscient narrators, the tone stays consistent whichever character they choose to put the camera on.  

To avoid head hopping, even an omniscient narrator must often choose to keep things focused on one perception. Character A speaks. Character B replies. But we get Character A’s mental reaction to it, their sense of character B’s tone of voice, their processing of what that means for their objectives. They might misconstrue character B, and we as readers might realise this at the time or later, but the narrator won’t openly point it out. All we hear of character B (in this scene) is what’s outwardly perceptible to character A. This is usually much more dynamic and immersive than having a rhythm where Character A speaks, then thinks something about what they’ve just said. Then Character B replies, and Character B thinks something about their own reply. Then Character A processes that reply. Similarly, at a scene break level if a character wonders something and the narrator immediately takes us to that person or place to find an answer, it can (or it might not) feel too neat, might limit suspense compared to letting the character sweat it out and letting the reader do so alongside them. The focus, the unknowing and the potential that creates for uncertainty in the character, is often much more engaging than the back-and-forth rhythm often thought of as head hopping.

Note here that film and television doesn’t suffer from the same issue for a couple of reasons. The physical space is conjured immediately, so when a scene shifts or the camera shows us someone new or a different part of the same frame, it isn’t quite as jarring. Immersion is immediate than in the novel, which must describe its landscape and how characters move across it. More importantly, film and tv focuses only on the external. There is no head hopping because we are never inside anyone’s head.

Another of the major drawbacks of head hopping is the reader starts to lose track of whether a focus character perceives something, or whether the narrator is telling us that another character perceives something, or if something is definitively true. Suspense is reduced as soon as it’s created. Character depth is dimmed. Rather than feeling big and important, the world starts to feel small, its characters oversimplified, because we don’t have the space to spend enough time with our protagonists and spend too much time with secondary or tertiary characters. The tone becomes definitive rather than nuanced. This brings us on to the second reason writing a good omniscient narrator is so difficult. The depth of emotional perception required to get it right.

Going deep

One good test for whether an omniscient narrator is right for you is how comfortable you are writing profoundly emotionally articulate prose. Think of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Austen – they are extremely socially and emotionally astute writers, understanding societies and how people conform or break out of their rules and what that costs them. To be a good author you need to be a good empath, to be able to put yourself in someone’s shoes, but you need to be an extraordinary one to write omniscient narrators. Because the omniscient narrator sees more than the characters themselves, this often permits the narrator to perform a detailed autopsy on a still living character. Someone like Eleanor Catton is an excellent modern example. Take for instance, this passage from Birnam Wood, which uses an omniscient narrator but one who focuses on a single character at a time:

“She had grown up with a stout faith in the proven clarity of right and wrong, and had never doubted for a moment that to be treated as an adult was better than to be treated as a child; but she had feared, in lonely moments, that for her parents she existed merely as a kind of party trick, a dazzling proof of how well she had been parented, a living testament not to her own powers of conviction and discernment but to theirs. Even as an adult she could not dispel, at times, a nagging sense of fraudulence, that she was most valued for what she most easily performed”.

There are several noteworthy things here. The first is the narrator’s comfort in rolling time backwards to Meera’s (the shein this passage) formative years. They don’t choose to shift time forwards here – they could if they wished, but given the way the narrative accelerates towards tragedy, which technically means someone realising their fatal flaws too late, that is a wise choice. Note too just how dextrous this narrator is with the emotional scalpel. They are not saying simply that Meera had a strong sense of right and wrong. That would be more economical, but it would oversimplify. The presentation is so much more refined, the layering of competing emotions and the traumas it engenders so much more precise that it makes Meera a true individual.  

Perhaps most importantly of all, note how the narrator goes just a bit further than Meera herself might freely admit in a third person limited narration or a first-person presentation. We are told here that she tries to dispel these things. In another point of view that dispelling might work. Here, that narrator can give us more, can show more of Meera’s flaws.

Finally, note how easily this could be called “telling” as opposed to “showing”. The complexity of the emotions and the sense of how they further the story, in this case letting us deeper into Meera’s view of herself and hinting at the lies she tells herself, supports the tragedy that will soon start to unravel and avoids the sense of telling oversimplifying. When telling adds nuance and depth, it’s much less troubling than the other way round. If the level of telling is more simplistic, criticisms of that telling, a request for more showing, is sure to follow. Heavy sensory detail is another way of offsetting a large amount of telling. Perfume: the story of a murderer is a prime example.

Who actually is the narrator?

This is a crucial question because the omniscient narrator is, without a doubt, a character in the book. This applies whether they are unidentified and unintrusive in the style of Birnam Woods’ narrator or many of the classics, or whether they are named and very much involved, like Death in The Book Thief.

Wherever they sit on this visibility spectrum, but their tone and language are what is used to tell the story. They might be curmudgeonly, grandiose, sassy (Austen’s narrators tend to be much sassier than most readers remember), or anything else. But they have a voice, biases, and favourites. They are in charge of pointing the camera as it were, and the act of pointing it at one person involves by necessity not pointing it at someone else. An omniscient narrator must be as precise as a director in choosing who is most interesting to focus on and from what narrative distance (a topic on which Emma Darwin is spectacular).

As Pullman puts it when talking of His Dark Materials “the narrator is with her (Lyra), on her side, but not limited to her perception of herself”. The key, he argues is not to think of the omniscient narrator (a narrative position he is fierce in defence of) as knowing everything but rather to think of it as knowing more than the characters. In this view, the narrator is not so much omniscient as multiscient, knowing lots. That’s Pullman’s word, while A.S Byatt prefers the term “knowledgeable narrator”, but the effect is similar. These writers are thinking of the external narrator not so much a God as a sprite, something more than human but less dull (remember Pullman’s views on religion) than a God.  

Perhaps, for the 21^st century at least, it would be better to break free of thinking of the omniscient narrator as a Christian-style God and place them as more of a deity within a pantheon. A Greek or Norse God, full of trickery, and with specialisations and particular interests seems to me a better description, happy to play with and toy with humans. Even if the narrator themselves is a human, then they are often human pretending to be slightly more, claiming to know one thing and invent another, and blurring that boundary.

I like the multiscient label for the way it invites us to think of the spritely playfulness an omniscient narrator can display. A good omniscient narrator often relishes their role as storyteller, and they don’t have to be tricksy or malevolent to have a purpose. They might be seeking catharsis (Briony Tallis we are looking at you) or to process something (hello Death in The Book Thief), lamenting (like A Series of Unfortunate Events) or simply revelling in encyclopaedic knowledge (like Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell) or they might be so distinct from humans that their perspective.

As for whether a narrator should, like Death or Briony Tallis, be a named character, again, the story is monarch. In Atonement, it services the story, not just its themes, but its plot, its very identity, to hide Briony’s involvement until the end. McEwan invites us to reshape our understanding of the book with that reveal, to rethink things, to look for clues we missed. Of course it was Briony, we tell ourselves, when we think back to how the first chapter told us about the little girl designing every part of the play, writing the script, building the props. Retrospective meaning is just as important as what we see at the time. The same applies to books like Golden Hill or Less, which also pull the narrator twist card. Another book might invite the reader to guess the narrator, making this part of the mystery and the appeal. Gossip Girl is perhaps the 21^st century’s best-known example. In The Book Thief on the other hand, the spectre of Death the spectator, the observer, is integral to the reader’s understandings of the book from the beginning. The purpose and tone is deliberately meditative rather than shocking.

This does introduce important questions about unreliable narrators or multiple unreliable narrators (aka The Rashomon Effect – for the greatest example of this read An Instance of the Fingerpost). Again, this subject is too big and too interesting (just think of all the reasons a narrator can be unreliable and all the ways that can be communicated!) to condense in this article, and it applies not just to omniscient narrators but third-person limited and first-person narrators.

However, the thing to remember here is that there is no obligation to name a narrator, and it should only be done if you have a clear vision for how this fits into the narrative.

Aside 2: Through a wardrobe. Narrators who are present but unnamed.

During a recent re-read of The Magician’s Nephew, partly as a refresher before the story makes a long overdue appearance on the screen later this year, partly as any excuse to read to my infant daughter, I was struck by the narrative voice. The narrator in The Chronicles of Narnia is an occasional but unnamed intruder. They will occasionally offer comment on the characters as if they were an acquaintance, telling us what Diggory will go on to think after the end of the story for instance. This has a couple of interesting effects. The most interesting of these is that it bolsters the narrator’s credentials. We as a reader believe him to be closer to the action, to have better information. We are subtly being encouraged to trust the rendering of the story. And yet, we are simultaneously reminded that there is some fallibility here, a distance. This is not Diggory’s account. It’s someone else’s, who, like us, wasn’t there.

The reader too is often welcomed into this friendly embrace. They are warned (in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe the narrator famously warns children not to lock themselves in a wardrobe), comforted, engaged with. Unfamiliar things are pointed out. Lewis’ narrator chooses to comment for instance on the mores of the Victorian era, drawing the reader’s eye to elements that are unlike their own world – the proliferation of servants for instance. In LWW, The narrator hopes that the reader hasn’t been as miserable as Susan and Lucy watching Aslan’s demise. This sort of kindly association with the reader can be a great trick in children’s fiction, a baton very ably picked up by Katherine Rundell in the modern era.

And yet, for all his intrusion (and the narrator does have a distinctly male bent) the narrator never names themselves, nor is there any suggestion that the reader should be trying to guess who it is. It doesn’t matter to the story. Their involvement stops just short of making themselves a character affecting the action. Though commenting more overtly on the action, they are still just relaying, observing. Perhaps most importantly of all for the purposes of this discussion, the narrator never pretends to know everything. King Tirian in The Last Battle for instance is described as between twenty and twenty-five years old. In the Voyage of the Dawn Treader the narrator explicitly says he doesn’t know how the Lone Islands came to be part of Narnia. Perhaps this is simply a playful way of drawing a distinction to his great friend Tolkien (perhaps Tolkien’s fox was his nod to Lewis?), who would of course have carefully mapped out the political, social and linguistic history of the islands before including them in the story. And yet, when it comes to characterisation, this distinction matters. To return to The Magician’s Nephew, the narrator often tells us directly what Polly or Diggory or Uncle Andrew were thinking, why they acted how they did, what consequences (regret etc.,) those actions would have on their later life. They are comfortable navigating forwards and backwards into a character’s history or a character’s future as well as showing them to the reader in the present.

But other characters are treated as unknowable. Chief among these are the White Witch and Aslan.

That distance fundamentally changes how we approach the series. We are not given an insight into Aslan’s thought processes, and this is a big part of furthering the sense that he is “not a tame lion”. The witch is unknowable, part of a world that she should never have come to, evil. To give children access to her evil thoughts, would, some could argue, be a corrupting act on the narrator’s part. And isn’t it revealing that a story featuring an omniscient God in the form of Aslan does not pretend to full omniscience on the part of its narrator? A Chronicles of Narnia told by Aslan would be a less engaging Chronicles of Narnia for the human reader, because it would lose the mystique of Aslan and the humanness of its characters. If your narrator becomes too godlike, too infallible, too objective, if they are actually omniscient, ask yourself if knowing less, if showing less, would make for a better story. Could a God ever quite perfect a human voice?

Unless you have a clear vision for your narrator as a character though, often it’s best to choose the more detached style of unreliable narrator, the one who is observing the story, like Catton’s, without being a named part or without poking their head through too often. This allows maximum immersion in the world of the novel, the deepest sensation of living as the characters.

Closing the space

One of the most important writing techniques to master, whether you’re writing third-person limited or third-person omniscient is free indirect discourse. Free indirect discourse was mastered and popularised by Jane Austen and describes the phenomenon where a character’s voice is woven directly into the narrative.  It’s a way of injecting their voice and feelings without having to use direct thought, which is fine to use but which many writers prefer to eschew. And while it’s often more associated with third-person limited nowadays as a way of adding voice, it’s just as if not more powerful in omniscient perspective.

One of the modern masters of this is Guy Gavriel Kay. His books mostly use a single narrator comfortable commenting on the sweep of history before and after the events they are describing, allowing him to spend the most time in the languid, vivid, elegiac style that he’s so skilled at writing, creating a heroic, melancholic tone that’s a wonder of the modern literary world in my eyes. But that narrator often lets themselves drift very close to the characters, using lots of free indirect discourse with the effect that they often seem to be defending our heroes and denouncing our villains. Kay will dial in and out the extent to which the narrator sounds like a character, the words they choose to use, how the sentence cadence supports their frame of mind, with something like lists of strong verbs attending particularly powerful, runaway emotions. He will also often choose to examine key set pieces from multiple points of view, but rather than do this via head hopping, going from one character to another and back again, he does this one character at a time.

In Children of Earth and Sky for instance, a central theme is characters failing to understand one another, failing to account for how one choice made for one invisible reason can have a totally different set of consequences for another character.

Less can be more

I realise this has become a long essay. So what should you take away if you want to write a good omniscient narrator? Well firstly that you can, and if you want to you should! But you do need to have a clear vision of how your narrator is going to support the story that you want to tell, what they’re going to sound like, who they are going to choose to focus on.

People have been fighting about omniscient perspective for over a century, with Percy Lubbock advocating for a single POV and E.M Forster defending the possibilities of the omniscient.

And still, the omniscient narrator endures, even if it’s not as popular as it once was. It would be a sad day for fiction if the omniscient narrator ever does die.

A few summary tips and tricks for writing omniscient narration.

• An omniscient narrator doesn’t necessarily have to know everything, though they do need to know more than the characters and use that knowledge at least sometimes.

• The omniscient narrator will often become a character in their own right, but they can be more withdrawn, and either way they don’t have to be named, gendered or otherwise identifiable.

• The narrator can peek out behind the curtain to different degrees. This should be done with intention if it’s done at all.

• Deciding what the narrator does and doesn’t show is vital. The narrator moves the camera – it doesn’t move of its own accord. Every switch in focus should serve the narrative.

• Too much shifting of the camera can feel like head hopping, reducing conflict, mystery, and suspense, increasing the narrative distance, shallowing characterisation, and generally de-immersing the reader. Make sure shifts are meaningful, intentional, and controlled.

• You will need to decide on a narrator’s tone, and this should be consistent. If the language and tone of narrative voice changes too much when different characters are in view, it’s a sign that you’re probably writing third-person limited. If so, own it, and make sure that the book conforms to those rules, taking the advantages that confers.

• Use free indirect discourse to close the gap between narrator and characters.

• Get emotionally incisive.

• You can use the narrator’s identity to create a twist ending, though you don’t have to do this.

Some omniscient narrators that I’ve particularly enjoyed

Assorted 21^st century novelists

• Loot – Tania James

• Guy Gavriel Kay (almost any of his books, though note that the Fionavar Tapestry and Tigana have a slightly grander, epic tone than the more historical fantasies).

• Birnam Wood and The Luminaries – Eleanor Catton

• Matrix – Lauren Groff

• The Known World – Edward P. Jones

• His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman

Revealed narrators (feels omniscient until a reveal)

• Golden Wood – Francis Spufford

• Atonement – Ian McEwan

• Less – Andrew Sean Greer

(Immediately) named narrators pretending omniscience

• Oscar and Lucinda – Peter Carey

• The Book Thief – Markus Zusak

Satire, comedy, and / or genius vignettes

• Evelyn Waugh

• Louis de Bernieres

• P.G Wodehouse

Fun with footnotes (but please don’t use footnotes unless you’re as funny as these writers)

• Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell – Susanna Clarke

• Terry Pratchett (anything)

• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy -  Douglas Adams

Omniscient narratives where a place or an object is the central focus

• Loot - Tania James

• North Woods – Daniel Mason

• Barkskins – Annie Proulx

• But note that this can equally be achieved with non-omniscient approaches (e.g., Cloud Atlas, A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, Apeirogon)

Classical omniscient perspectives

• War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

• Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

• The Chronicles of Narnia – C.S. Lewis

• Perfume: the story of a murderer – Patrick Suskind

• Crime and Punishment – Dostoyevsky

• The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (Technically this is a frame narrative, with Tolkien pretending to translate a found manuscript - the Red Book of Westmarch. This was already a long essay, and I didn’t want to get into it too much here.)