Narrators, Point of View, Tense, and Narrative Techniques

All flashcards

Narration

Written or spoken commentary that conveys a story to an audience.

Narrative mode

The choices used to develop a narrator and tell a story, including point of view, tense, and technique.

Framing narrative

A larger story that encloses or introduces another story.

Unreliable narrator

A narrator whose account cannot be fully trusted because it may be biased, mistaken, limited, or selective.

Stream of consciousness

A technique that attempts to reproduce a character’s thought processes, including fragmented inner thoughts.

Quiz questions

1. Which pronouns typically signal first-person narration?Answer: I or we
2. What characterizes an omniscient point of view?Answer: The narrator can know events and thoughts across the story world.
3. Which description best fits an objective point of view?Answer: It reports events without presenting characters’ thoughts or feelings.
4. What is the historical present in narrative?Answer: Using present tense to narrate events that occurred in the past.
5. Why might readers compare a narrator’s statements with other details in a story?Answer: To judge how much confidence to place in the narrator’s account.