Omniscient Narrator Examples

Omniscient narrator

The omniscient narrator is the one who narrates knowing absolutely everything that happens: the actions, thoughts and motivations of the characters.

By having all this information, the omniscient narrator is not part of the story, that is, he is not a character.

Narrator types

In addition to the omniscient narrator, there are three types of narrator, depending on the perspective he takes:

Characteristics of the omniscient narrator

Examples of omniscient storyteller

1. “Phone calls”, Roberto Bolaños

One night when he has nothing to do, B manages, after two phone calls, to get in touch with X. Neither of them is young and it shows in their voices that cross Spain from one end to the other. Reborn friendship and after a few days they decide to meet again. Both parties drag divorces, new illnesses, frustrations.

When B takes the train to X's town, he is still not in love. The first day they spend it locked up in X's house, talking about their lives (actually it is X who speaks, B listens and from time to time asks); at night X invites him to share her bed. B deep down does not feel like sleeping with X, but accepts. In the morning, when he wakes up, B is in love again.

1. “Tallow ball”Guy de Maupassant

After a few days, and the fear of the beginning dissipated, calm was restored. In many houses a Prussian officer shared a family table. Some, out of courtesy or sensitive feelings, pitied the French and declared that they were repulsed by being forced to take an active part in the war. They were thanked for these demonstrations of appreciation, also thinking that their protection would be necessary at some point. With adulation, perhaps they would avoid the upheaval and the expense of more lodgings.

What would it have led to hurt the powerful, on whom they depended? He was more reckless than patriotic. And recklessness is not a fault of the current bourgeois of Rouen, as it had been in those times of heroic defenses, which glorified and polished the city. It was reasoned - hiding for it in the French chivalry - that an extreme disgrace could not be judged Inside the house the attentions, while in public each one showed little deference to the soldier Foreign. In the street, as if they did not know each other; but at home he was very different, and they treated him in such a way that they kept their German for social gatherings at home, as a family, every night.

1. “The banquet”Julio Ramón Ribeyro

That was a holiday, he went out with his wife to the balcony to contemplate his illuminated garden and close that memorable day with a bucolic dream. The landscape, however, seemed to have lost its sensible properties, because wherever he wanted him to lay his eyes, Don Fernando saw himself, he saw himself in a jacket, in jar, smoking cigars, with a background decoration where (as in certain tourist posters) the monuments of the four most important cities of Europe. Farther away, at an angle to his chimera, he saw a railway returning from the forest with its wagons laden with gold. And everywhere, moving and transparent as one allegory of sensuality, he saw a female figure that had the legs of a coconut, the hat of a marquise, the eyes of a Tahitian and absolutely nothing of his wife.

On the day of the banquet, the first to arrive were the snitches. From five o'clock in the afternoon they were stationed on the corner, trying to keep an incognito that their hats betrayed, their manners exaggeratedly absent-minded and above all that terrible air of crime that investigators, secret agents and in general all those who carry out jobs often acquire clandestine.

1. “El Capote”, Nicolás Gogol

The woman in labor was given a choice between three names: Mokkia, Sossia, and the martyr Josdasat. "No," the sick woman said to herself. What a few names! Not!" To please her, they turned over the almanac sheet, which read three other names, Trifiliy, Dula, and Varajasiy.

"But this all seems like a real punishment!" exclaimed the mother. What names! I have never heard such a thing! If only it were Varadat or Varuj; but Trifiliy or Varajasiy!

They turned another sheet of the almanac and the names of Pavsikajiy and Vajticiy were found.

-Well; I see, "said the old mother," that this must be her destiny. Well then, he better be named after his father. Akakiy is called the father; that the son is also called Akakiy.

And thus the name Akakiy Akakievich was formed. The child was baptized. During the sacramental act he wept and made such faces, as if he sensed that he was to be a titular counselor. And that's how things happened. We have cited these events in order to convince the reader that everything had to happen this way and that it would have been impossible to give it another name.

1. “The swimmer", John Cheever

It was one of those mid-summer Sundays when everyone repeats, "I drank too much last night." The parishioners whispered it to the leave the church, he could hear himself from the priest's lips as he took off his cassock in the sacristy, as well as in the fields of golf and on the tennis courts, and also in the nature reserve where the head of the Audubon group suffered the effects of a terrible hangover.

"I drank too much," Donald Westerhazy was saying.
"We all drank too much," Lucinda Merrill was saying.
"It must have been the wine," Helen Westerhazy explained. I drank too much claret.

The setting for this last dialogue was the edge of the Westerhazy pool, whose water, coming from an artesian well with a high percentage of iron, had a soft green hue. The weather was splendid.

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