Our first consideration of the concept of the narrator will come by way of the literary theorist Gerard Genette. One way you can think of the narrator is almost as a kind of character, an implicit and invisible character who shapes, filters, orders and presents the narrative information that we have access to.
An important concept related to the activities performed by the narrator is focalization, which is similar to the notion of point of view, or ‘POV’ as it is called in visual media fields. The narrator, in essence, controls our point of view, and the narrative provides members of the audience with different positions for accessing narrative information. Genette makes a distinction between the question of who the narrator is, and what the point of view is created by the narrative focalization:
Definition
Focalization, a term coined by Genette (1972), may be defined as a selection or restriction of narrative information in relation to the experience and knowledge of the narrator, the characters or other, more hypothetical entities in the storyworld.
Explication
Genette introduced the term “focalization” as a replacement for “perspective” and “point of view” (→ Perspective — Point of View). He considers it to be more or less synonymous with these terms, describing it as a mere “reformulation” ([1983] 1988: 65) and “general presentation of the standard idea of ‘point of view’” (84). This, however, is an underestimation of the conceptual differences between focalization and the traditional terms.
Genette distinguishes three types or degrees of focalization — zero, internal and external — and explains his typology by relating it to previous theories:
“The first term, zero focalization, corresponds to what English-language criticism calls narrative with omniscient narrator and Pouillon ‘vision from behind,’ and which Todorov symbolizes by the formula Narrator > Character (where the narrator knows more than the character, or more exactly, says more than any of the characters knows). In the second term, internal focalization, Narrator = Character (the narrator says only what a given character knows); this is narrative with ‘point of view’ after Lubbock, or with ‘restricted field’ after Blin; Pouillon calls it ‘vision with.’ In the third term, external focalization, Narrator < Character. The narrator says less than the character knows, this provides for an “objective” or “behaviorist” narrative. External focalization, “has the narrator focus on visible, external aspects of events and characters in the narrative. (Source)
Narrator Types
The diagram above illustrates how the narrator can be understood as a kind of implicit (hidden, invisible, sort of there) character, who just happens to be the character telling the story, or can be positioned through a variety of participant-observer constructions. For instance, an omniscient narrator can be ‘neutral’ or unbiased towards characters and events, or have an ‘editorial’ (opinionated, biased, slanted) perspective on them. Narrators who are themselves characters in the story can shift focus onto different parts of the story (which makes them ‘variable’) or there may even be several narrator-characters in a story (‘multiple’ narrators). Such narrators may be part of the action or distant non-involved observers. The Genette diagram above conveys these kinds of shifts or possibilities in narrator types.
Of course, many others have written about the narratorial point of view, and you can find plenty of other industry examples such as this one online:
Genette’s concept of focalization is considered to be an advancement on traditional narrator definitions that you may have heard used elsewhere, which you should also know about given their ubiquity:
First and Third Person Narration
- A first person narrator is also a character in the story, either major or minor.
- A third person narrator is not a character in the story.
Types of Third Person Narrator
- Objective
- Limited
- Omniscient
Objective 3rd Person Narrator
- Does not allow the audience to access any of the characters’ consciousness.
- Does not focus the story on any single character, acting very much like a camera, presenting the scene “as it is”
Limited 3rd Person Narrator
- Gives us access to a single character’s consciousness or
- Focuses attention on only one character.
Omniscient 3rd Person Narrator
- Gives us access to the consciousness of more than one character or
- Focuses attention on multiple characters.
Below are some examples of narrative rich gaming worlds. How would you describe these images in terms of focalization (or narratorial POV)?
The choice of medium can affect the overall focalization of the narrative. As you explore digital narratives, think about the ways that the interface can shape focalization, or the conveyance of narrative information. Because of all the differing parts and interconnections between sections of an interactive narrative, each node of the interaction can be exploited differently to explore and produce narratorial effects, parsing out narrative information differently in the shaping not just of our point of view, but also our ability to control it.
Curiosity and Concern
Narrative information is often parsed out differently by giving the audience more, less, or the same amount of information as the characters have in the story. McKee has called this the modulation of Curiosity and Concern, and defined three combinations of narrative knowledge between the narrator and the audience.
We can explore this matrix through an active viewing exercise. Get out a blank sheet of paper, and write out the following matrix parameters below. Watch the short film Doodlebug (an early film of Christopher Nolan, link below) and map out how you understand the differences between what YOU know as the viewer, and what the protagonist knows, in terms of what is happening in the story.
Image and Text, Sequence and Simultaneity
The specific media used in a narrative also play important roles in structuring narrative information. Consider for example the differences between Text and Image.
Think about how these media present narrative information differently. We might say:
- Text presents each unit of information sequentially (letter, word, sentence, paragraph), while an image presents much information in an all-at-once manner.
- Text needs to be decoded (you need to know the language) whereas images can often and largely be understood across cultures.
- Text can provide easy access to an inner subjective world (e.g. capturing the characters’ thoughts), whereas photographic imagery restricts us to an external perspective on characters (which can be overcome to some extent with voiceover monologue, which is not very common, though).
- Visually text is boring to look at (black squiggles on a white background), whereas images are more perceptually vivid. Text can be made mentally vivid through creative writing techniques, but this vividness is in our imagination, not in the black squiggles on a white background themselves (an exception would be various calligraphic practices one finds in different cultures or historical eras).
- Images may have a harder time conveying abstract concepts, which by nature are more language-based.
There are probably other contrasts you can think of in the way that the mediums of text and image convey narrative information, but these are important ones.
Now let’s watch a music video! (a little change of cognitive pace).
This music video remediates the medium of a book (because the story progresses through page flips) and also the mediums associated with animation (print cartoons, comics). The video also features some interesting spatial design, in that the two pages of the book are used either to unify a single space across both pages, or to show separate spaces while also continuing the main sight lines (floor, ceiling etc.) to create the sense of a unified frame out of different ones. Also, attention is managed through the use of movement and color (visual elements grab our attention better when they are moving, or when they are a more noticeable figure against a ground of negative space because of how color shapes visual hierarchy).
Let’s analyze another clip to explore how a medium can be exploited to control and manage the flow of narrative information. Here a scene from A.I. (Spielberg, 2001) will be broken down into representative shots.
Here’s one way you can interpret this short scene, if this were a text-based story:
A woman’s vision is perfectly fine. She is talking to her husband in the living room of their home. But her husband is a tricky lad, and he knows that if he pushes her away from the home’s elevator, everything close to it will become blurry because her eyesight can suddenly go bad when things are further away.
As he predicted, when the elevator door to their home opens, her vision gets all blurry. She can’t see! She leans forward to try to get her vision in focus, but everything is still blurry. So she decides to look down at the floor, because anything at floor level is always perfectly in focus visually for some reason.
She sees some shoes, then follows the shoes upward. Because she began looking at the in-focus shoes, her vision stays in focus and by the end of the scene she can see normally! Look, it’s a new shiny AI boy!
This satirical interpretation is meant to point out how completely unnatural information is often parsed out in the medium of film.
Here’s another example, the opening to The Usual Suspects:
Here, instead of giving us blurry vision to withhold narrative information, point of view and cinematography work together to omit the head of the antagonist. The head is not literally omitted as in the film The Man Without a Head; rather the camera framing is used so that only the protagonist can see who the antagonist is. Also, we get a lot of information about the deck of the boat, and as in the AI clip, we get a lot of information about shoes (black shoes instead of white shoes!).
If this were rendered in a novel or short story form, it is highly unlikely that we would get so much information about the deck’s surface and shoes. Who would write, or want to read, “The black shoes moved forward along the ship’s deck. Even though everyone’s vision was fine, for some reason we cannot see the head of the bad guy.” This manner of doling out narrative information just wouldn’t make any sense in a novel, but is used all the time in cinema to present narrative information in what can only be called a highly unnatural — i.e., stylized, abstracted — manner.
The Fourth Wall and Interface
Another pair of concepts that impact the overall focalization (narratorial point of view) are the fourth wall and direct address. The fourth wall refers to an imaginary barrier between the audience and the presentation of narrative information. Fourth walls are everywhere. Here are some examples:
- In theaters, whether plays or films, the audience sits in chairs arranged in aisles and rows, while the narrative occurs on a stage or a screen.
- In a classroom, the stage and screen is replaced by a lecturer with a Powerpoint presentation which is also on a screen.
- In religious traditions, you will often have the priestly folks doing their thing up on a raised platform of some kind, while everyone else is sitting, kneeling or bowing etc.
While the 4th wall is a spatial imaginary default of presenting narrative, there are also some established ways of breaking or violating the 4th wall:
- Audience participation
- Interfaces and controllers
- Direct address
A well-known example of audience participation is in the Peter Pan (live musical) scene where the audience is asked to yell out ,“I believe in fairies!” (in some versions) in order to save Tinker Bell’s life. In other versions, the audience just has to clap:
Screen-based interfaces often violate the fourth wall, because literally one’s thumbs have to be placed all over the visual world in order to interact with it (on a touchscreen device) or there are UI elements embedded in the visual presentation. And game controllers take our attention off the screen in order to manipulate visualized interactive outcomes.
With the UIs of a digital narrative environment, the fourth wall becomes tangible in a way that is not typically associated with the concept. Instead of an imaginary of invisible barrier, we have something more like a window to click on that is also a general source of visual information display. The glass of the media display screen (e.g. phone, tablet or tv), so like a fourth wall in its transparency, is a materialized surface for hand-eye coordination and mental parsing of key strategic and narrative knowledge.
Direct Address
Direct address is when someone in the narrative world breaks the immersive spell and communicates directly with the audience in some way. Below are two examples. In the Zardoz clip, an early character of the film speaks directly to the viewer, explaining everything that is about to happen (sort of, it only makes sense after you watch the movie). In the A Woman is a Woman clip, the protagonist winks at us in a very cute French way.
What these examples illustrate are that there are multiple layers of address that coordinate to produce narrative mediations:
Let’s use the example of the French film excerpt to explain this concept of layers of address. In the opening scene, the character Angela enters a cafe and askes for a white coffee. The character Émile then asks for a green coffee. Before finishing her coffee, Angela suddenly realizes she’s running late and has to go, winking at the camera on her way out of the cafe.
There are at least three layers we can identify in this scene:
- There are the actors in their film world, inside a cafe, doing things and speaking to each other, which equated to the level of action.
- There are real people being paid as actors to act in a film, and there is a director and his film crew with cameras, microphones, lighting equipment as well as editing and post-production spaces to cut the film together. This is the level of nonfictional communication.
- There is also an imagined audience – a group of film goers who like sophisticated films– and a clever filmmaker using various techniques associated with French New Wave aesthetics and style, playing games with his audience. This is the level of fictional mediation and discourse.
Each of these layers are present in the film clip above. The first is easy enough to identify– characters of the film world inside a Parisian café. The second one is also obvious, because there will of course be real people creating the film in the first place. The third category is the trickiest. First, there is a ‘game’ being played here, when the actress winks at us. There’s a lot of meaning packed into this wink. The wink says:
- We are having fun with this film, we are being real and fake at the same time.
- We think our audience will appreciate this kind of game, because you are sophisticated French people watching a film by a famous auteur director.
- We also played this game in another way just a moment ago, when “white coffee” (coffee with cream) was contrasted to “green coffee” (which doesn’t exist, since this is decades before matcha lattes). We are assuming an audience that likes and expects film games like these from directors such as this.
- Oh and by the way, I’m just a regular human actress momentarily playing this role for some income, just as you are sitting there in your chair, having paid for a ticket to spend some time in the theatre with this film.
This third layer is different from the other two, and might even be described as a gaming layer, or game-type layer, present in all fictional narratives. It is a zone of narrative discourse where one can reveal, and play with, the apparent rules of the game, in this case the rules of creating a fictional universe to begin with! This is distinct from the idea of incorporating game mechanics into a narrative, since this is more like a social game in media making and reception that defines the rules for creating imaginary worlds.
Related Articles
Narrative in Analog & Digital Media
Narrative Continuity vs Poetic Montage
The Structure of Narrative Time
The Fourth Wall & Direct Address
Fact, Fiction & Narrative Contestation
Character Interactions and Narrative Progression
Agency in Interactive Narrative
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