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Reading Prose Fiction
Quick questions on Narrative perspective explained: H2 Literature in English
6short Q&A pairs drawn directly from our worked dot-point answer. For full context and worked exam questions, read the parent dot-point page.
how does it position the reader toward the characters?Show answer
Treating point of view as a deliberate technique - not a neutral window - is what turns plot summary into analysis. :::
What is the unreliable narrator?Show answer
An unreliable narrator is one whose account we are invited to distrust, whether through self-deception, limited understanding, or deliberate manipulation. Unreliability creates dramatic irony: the reader sees past the narrator to a truth the narration conceals or distorts. Signs include over-insistence, contradictions, the discrediting of others, and details that do not fit the narrator's interpretation. Analysing unreliability is high-value, because the meaning lives in the gap between narrator and reader.
What is free indirect style?Show answer
Free indirect discourse blends the narrator's voice with a character's thoughts, without quotation marks or "she thought". A sentence can carry both the character's idiom and the narrator's perspective at once. This is one of the most powerful tools in fiction: it lets a narrator move close to a character and then, by a shift in word or tone, comment on or undercut them, producing intimacy and irony together.
What is q1?Show answer
What is the difference in effect between first-person and limited third-person narration? [2 marks]
What is q2?Show answer
What signals might mark a narrator as unreliable? [2 marks]
What is q3?Show answer
Why is free indirect style such a powerful technique? [3 marks]
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