It is optional in most other storytelling formats, such as films, plays, television shows and video games, in which the story can be conveyed through other means, like dialogue between characters or visual action.
The narrator may merely relate the story to the audience without being involved in the plot and may have varied awareness of characters' thoughts and distant events.
A variety of different theoretical approaches have sought to define point of view in terms of person, perspective, voice, consciousness and focus.
[4] The Russian semiotician Boris Uspenskij identifies five planes on which point of view is expressed in a narrative: spatial, temporal, psychological, phraseological and ideological.
Lanser concludes that this is "an extremely complex aspect of point of view, for it encompasses the broad question of the narrator's distance or affinity to each character and event…represented in the text".
But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy.Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Gamebooks, including the American Choose Your Own Adventure and British Fighting Fantasy series (the two largest examples of the genre), are not true second-person narratives, because there is an implicit narrator (in the case of the novel) or writer (in the case of the series) addressing an audience.
This device of the addressed reader is a near-ubiquitous feature of the game-related medium, regardless of the wide differences in target reading ages and role-playing game system complexity.
Similarly, text-based interactive fiction, such as Colossal Cave Adventure and Zork, conventionally has descriptions that address the user, telling the character what they are seeing and doing.
This practice is also encountered occasionally in text-based segments of graphical games, such as those from Spiderweb Software, which make ample use of pop-up text boxes with character and location descriptions.
[13] Omniscient point of view is presented by a narrator with an overarching perspective, seeing and knowing everything that happens within the world of the story, including what each of the characters is thinking and feeling.
The inclusion of an omniscient narrator is typical in nineteenth-century fiction, including works by Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy and George Eliot.
[15][non-primary source needed] Examples of Limited or close third-person point of view, confined to one character's perspective, include J.M.
Additionally, Haring draws comparisons between Thousand and One Nights and the oral storytelling observed in parts of rural Ireland, islands of the Southwest Indian Ocean and African cultures such as Madagascar.
Examples include the multiple narrators' feelings in William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, and the character Offred's often fragmented thoughts in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.
Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, in which the novel's narrator Holden Caulfield is biased, emotional and juvenile, divulging or withholding certain information deliberately and at times probably quite unreliable.