Authors write with a distinctive ‘voice’, or style, or any number of voices, depending on what they are writing. In a piece of fiction the voice of the narrator is not the voice of the author, even if it is written in first person. The author is writing ‘in character’, from the point of view of the narrator, and obviously in character when writing dialogue.
Authors tend to be well educated, articulate individuals, but may narrate a story from the point of view of an uneducated, inarticulate character. For example, in the short story, The Thief, Anahera Gildea, a New Zealand writer, poet, and academic, narrates from the point of view of a teenage girl talking about her family:
“And Trina walked youse back from school every day so it’s not like you were all running round loose. Well, she was supposed to walk you, but she was like ten people spaces in front of you cos she said you suck. You say to Sook that Trina’s just cow and a ho and not to worry bout it cos you’re good to walk on your own self anyway and she can just fuck up. Sook doesn’t say anything much cos her thumb’s in her gob but at least she doesn’t ever cry.”
Another feature of the narrative is the increasingly common trend to write in present tense and in second person. You is I and youse (dialectical Māori English) is us.
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A third person narrative may be an authorial voice with a point of view outside the story, an omniscient narrator, like an all knowing ‘eye of God’. Or it may be a limited third person narrative, told from the point of view of a character in the story; limited because the reader can only know what the narrator observes. Events are filtered through the lens of the narrator and recounted in the voice of the narrator.
Journey, by Patricia Grace, a New Zealand Māori writer, begins, He was an old man going on a journey. He remains nameless throughout the story. The narrative of his journey by taxi and train to Wellington is told from his point of view, his observations, thoughts, feelings and stream of consciousness self-talk.
“He liked the word journey even though you didn’t quite say it. It wasn’t a word for saying only for saving up in your head, and that way you could enjoy it.”
There are short passages of mundane conversation with the taxi driver:
“Out early today old man.”
“Business young fulla.”
“Early bird catches the early worm.”
“It’ll be a sorry worm young fulla, a sorry worm.”
“Like that is it?”
“Like that.”
Grace’s style is minimalistic and in her short stories and novels, dialogues are rarely explicitly attributed. There is no: the taxi driver said, the old man said, he said unless it is not clear from the context, and by the speaker addressing the listener: …old man and …young fulla. In other stories Grace has as much as three pages of dialogue, uninterrupted by a single he said or she said.
The narrative of The Journey engages the senses as part of the narrator’s observations.
“You could sit back and enjoy the old taxi smells of split upholstery and cigarette, and of something else that could have been the young fulla’s hair oil or his b.o.”
The old man’s reference to business and It’ll be a sorry worm foreshadows later events and the purpose of the trip to the capital. He has had a long running dispute with the council about getting consent to subdivide family land and build houses with gardens for his nieces and nephews. The council has other plans to develop the area and won’t allow residential development with a concentration of Māori families. The bureaucrat patiently explains the long term plans and adds, “It immediately brings down the value of your land…” The old man loses patience and loses his temper at the racist remark and “wanted very much to lean over the desk and swing a heavy punch.” Instead he kicks the desk and puts his foot through it and he is ordered out of the office. The Journey is a social realism story with a social justice theme.
The meeting at the council office is not narrated ‘as it happens’. Rather it is recalled not long after the event back at the railway station, as part of the narrator’s interior monologue, which alternates between his observations at the station and his thoughts about the meeting. One other event occurs while the old man is waiting at the station. He meets his nephew George, a chance meeting foreshadowed by the old man thinking about him because he knew he lived in Wellington, and thinking about the sadness of his childhood. George has joined a gang and is a type of disaffected, marginalised Māori youth. There is a poignant moment as George and the old man sit together quietly.
“There’s no sense, no sense in anything, but what use telling that to George when George already knew sitting beside him wordless. What use telling George you go empty handed and leave nothing behind, when George had always been empty handed, had never wanted anything except to have nothing.”
” How are you son?”
“All right Uncle. Nothing else to say. Only sitting until it was late enough to go. Going, not limping, and not going to die either.”
The empty hands are recalled in the last sentence of the story: “He sat on the edge of his bed for a long time looking at the palms of his hands.”
There is no transition from the short paragraph in which the old man is walking, on his way to the council office, to waiting at the station after the meeting, just a double space between the paragraphs. One phrase, “his right foot was sore” signals a link back to the events of the meeting and the following paragraph is a monologue of his reflection on the meeting. More typically a writer would signpost the transition with a sentence beginning, “After he left the council office…” or some such phrase. Another device to denote a change of scene or change of time is simply to place a single asterisk * or line of asterisks ************* or some such symbol between the paragraphs.