The problem of voicing and choosing a narrator is one of the key tasks in fiction writing. The question isn't, "What's a good narrator?", but "What's a good narrator for this story?" And that depends on what it is you want the story to do.
I think that new writers are advised to stick to single POV characters to learn the ways in which POV matters. Too many newbies don't understand that POV is like a camera angle or a backdrop, and to switch it back and forth is to make the reader dizzy. Once you master that principle, though, you can have a lot of fun playing with POV. Writing the same scene from two different PsOV is instructive, for example.
The main question is, what's the narrator's attitude towards the action? Amused, regretful, angry, dismissive, ironic? And is this in order to inspire the same attitude in the reader, or to give the reader something to argue with? In a piece that is mainly about one character's feelings, it may help to tell the story from that character's POV.
The omniscient narrator certainly provides distance and perspective from the action -- which is a good thing sometimes, and a bad thing sometimes.
Right now I'm still reeling from the narrative voice in Atonement, which seems to be an omniscient narrator but is, in fact, Briony looking back on past events at the end of her life. That was a master stroke.
The narrators that stick in my mind most are Melville's untrustworthy narrators -- especially in Bartelby and Billy Budd.
I also love the way John Irving uses narrative voices. I particularly remember The Water Method Man, in which the narative alternates between the MC's 1st-person voice (describing his present) and a third-person narrator (describing his past). In Garp he uses a third person omniscient, but that story is about the sorrows of the whole world -- whereas Hotel New Hampshire is about it's like to grow up in one particular family, so the first person narrator works best.
I liked how John Varley, in Millennium, alternated between the "testimony" of the two MC's, who experienced the same events in a completely different sequence.
It's also nice to contrast Mary Renault's Fire From Heaven with The Persian Boy. In FFH she uses 3rd person omniscient, but particularly for the purpose of giving multple points-of-view. She wants us to see Alexander from many different angles. (It also makes for some beautiful moments, as the single sentence in which we experience the slave-groom's grief at not being bought by the king.) But TPB is is a love story, and the 1st person makes it more intimate.
no subject
I think that new writers are advised to stick to single POV characters to learn the ways in which POV matters. Too many newbies don't understand that POV is like a camera angle or a backdrop, and to switch it back and forth is to make the reader dizzy. Once you master that principle, though, you can have a lot of fun playing with POV. Writing the same scene from two different PsOV is instructive, for example.
The main question is, what's the narrator's attitude towards the action? Amused, regretful, angry, dismissive, ironic? And is this in order to inspire the same attitude in the reader, or to give the reader something to argue with? In a piece that is mainly about one character's feelings, it may help to tell the story from that character's POV.
The omniscient narrator certainly provides distance and perspective from the action -- which is a good thing sometimes, and a bad thing sometimes.
Right now I'm still reeling from the narrative voice in Atonement, which seems to be an omniscient narrator but is, in fact, Briony looking back on past events at the end of her life. That was a master stroke.
The narrators that stick in my mind most are Melville's untrustworthy narrators -- especially in Bartelby and Billy Budd.
I also love the way John Irving uses narrative voices. I particularly remember The Water Method Man, in which the narative alternates between the MC's 1st-person voice (describing his present) and a third-person narrator (describing his past). In Garp he uses a third person omniscient, but that story is about the sorrows of the whole world -- whereas Hotel New Hampshire is about it's like to grow up in one particular family, so the first person narrator works best.
I liked how John Varley, in Millennium, alternated between the "testimony" of the two MC's, who experienced the same events in a completely different sequence.
It's also nice to contrast Mary Renault's Fire From Heaven with The Persian Boy. In FFH she uses 3rd person omniscient, but particularly for the purpose of giving multple points-of-view. She wants us to see Alexander from many different angles. (It also makes for some beautiful moments, as the single sentence in which we experience the slave-groom's grief at not being bought by the king.) But TPB is is a love story, and the 1st person makes it more intimate.