Authorial omniscience, people assume, has had its day, much as that “vast, moth-eaten musical brocade” called religion has also had its. On one side, Tolstoy, say and on the other, Humbert Humbert or Italo Svevo’s narrator, Zeno Cosini, or Bertie Wooster. The common idea is that there is a contrast between reliable narration (third-person omniscience) and unreliable narration (the unreliable first-person narrator, who knows less about himself than the reader eventually does). In reality, we are stuck with third- and first-person narration. Anything else probably will not much resemble narration it may be closer to poetry, or prose-poetry. I can tell a story in the third person or in the first person, and perhaps in the second person singular, or in the first person plural, though successful examples of these latter two are rare,1 indeed. The house of fiction has many windows, but only two or three doors.
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