Excellent question.

Third omniscient is actually much more common in contemporary writing than people think. It’s just that writers now tend to use a much more restrained version of it than they did in the 19th century. So restrained it can look like some other form of third person.

Let’s take one my favorite books and I’ll show you what I mean. “Neuromancer” by William Gibson looks, at first glance, to be written in limited third (or, tight third, as it is called here on Deep Genre). That famous first sentence, and the many that sound so like it hover around perceptions that could be known to Case, the streetwise POV character: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. ‘It’s not like I’m using,’ Case heard someone say …”

Seems like straightforward tight third, right?

But what happens when, after many (delightful) pages of tight third, we get

“Somewhere deep in the Sprawl’s ferro-concrete roots, a train drove a column of stale air through a tunnel. The train itself was silent, gliding over its induction cushion, but displaced air made the tunnel sing, bass down into subsonics. Vibration reached the room where he lay and caused dust to rise from the cracks in the dessicated parquet floor.”

Sure, it’s gorgeous prose but, what? How could Case, who is awakened by the vibration, possibly know all of that? It sort of sounds like Case thinking, but it can’t be. Did the writer just break with the first twenty pages and slide into omni? Not quite.

You’ve actually been hearing a third person omniscient narrator the whole time, but one who just chooses to spend almost all of the book in tight third, only opening up for big, diorama-like passages once in a while, and never going inside anybody else’s head even then. Go back over the pages that you thought were tight third, and then you realize that the narrative voice is full of things that are too poetic and too cool for Case to think up or notice. Like rosewood doors, the exact personal history of minor characters, or the tailoring of somebody’s shirt cuffs, etc.

Here’s the trick: The voice, the tone that the 3rd omni narrator uses, is so close to Case that we never really notice the divide, we were just effortlessly carried from wide screen to close up and back without even knowing what was happening. The authorial voice is so close to a character who belongs in the moody, dark world of the novel that the commanding conceit of the omniscient narrator is hardly noticed, but the power of such a narrator is retained by the writer.

Henry James called this “effaced narration” and often used limited-third-omniscient in his books. Tons of the best writers use it today: John Banville (Kepler), Margaret Atwood (Handmaid’s Tale), John Crowley (The Deep), Cormac McCarthy (The Road).

The trick is the camouflage (the tone of the narration being one that is close to the characters, or to the feel of the book) and restraint (the omniscient voice chooses one or two characters whose heads we see into and that’s it for the whole novel. Furthermore, the wide-screen omni passages don’t tend to go on too long, nor do they contain info that is out of joint with feel of the book’s world and characters, even if the characters could never know it first-hand: e.g. Gibson’s omni voice is comfy telling us about an eerie train tunnel deep in the earth, but probably not about a kid’s birthday party, even though it could technically choose to do both. One would break the mood, take us too far from Case’s head, the other one is just right).

Some form of limited third-person omniscient is almost always being used in contemporary fiction, even if it looks like some fuzzy version of limited (tight) third.

If the writer dos not attend to this, then it would in a sense be breaking that ‘fourth wall’ Elizabeth refers to.

Flaubert in expressing Emma Bovary’s internal life was an absolute master of this aspect of free indirect narrative style, something which can positively load a passage with some marvellous ironies.

I guess my question is: is there such a thing as first person omni or is that a complete contradiction in terms? Was it a slip up or stretching poetic license? It definately threw me out of the story for a minute. Possible scenarios for 1st person-omni: when the main character is dead or is some kind of god-like being?

The effect was so startling to me that I decided to go back with the first person.

Which doesn’t affect your critique of the book, of course, but I felt I should clarify in case anybody is looking for examples of the POV.

Food for thought.

~J