The Omniscient POV: Readers Either Love it or Hate It
The omniscient narrator is like a big booming voice coming from high up above. Photo courtesy of VisualHunt
The third-person omniscient point of view (POV) is common in 19th century novels, British mysteries, and European fiction, but many American book editors and writing teachers dislike it. There are literary agents who will flat out reject manuscripts with an omni POV. This literary tool leaves no gray area. People either love it or hate it.
What’s an Omniscient POV?
A novel’s point of view can determine how readers will experience a story. Charles Dickens’s “A Tale of Two Cities” epitomizes the all-knowing narrator who can see what’s happening in London and Paris simultaneously. The omniscient narrator is often intrusive and opinionated. In “Leave the World Behind,” a contemporary novel by Rumaan Alam, the all-seeing narrator injects wide-ranging, and ultimately distracting, comments. When a character mulls over the possibility of the electrical grid breaking “like something built of Lego,” the omni narrator makes an info dump on how “Lego would never biodegrade and would outlast Notre Dame, the pyramids at Giza, the pigment daubed on the walls at Lascaux.” It left me scratching my head and skipping many pages.
It reminded me of my former literary agent who advises against the omni POV in her writing books and workshops. She’s right in pointing out that the omni POV places a great distance between the reader and a novel’s characters. It’s hard to care about characters when the reader is constantly interrupted by the all-knowing narrator.
As a novelist, I don’t use the omni POV. I prefer the third-person, limited POV because I want the reader to embark on a journey at the same time as my novel’s characters. For many literary agents, it’s the safest POV to sell to publishers, especially if the writers they represent are new.
Top 10 Novels with Omniscient POV
As a reader, I’m not against the omni POV, but there are a number of books I couldn’t finish reading because the POV became too distracting and even confusing. Indeed, few contemporary authors can pull off the omni POV beautifully. Here are 10 books that have used it effectively.
#1 “All the Light We Cannot See” by Anthony Doerr
#2 “Everything I Never Told You” by Celeste Ng
#3 “Station Eleven” by Emily St. John Mandel
#4 “Beloved” by Toni Morrison
#5 “Beartown” by Fredrick Backman
#6 “The Light Between Oceans” by M.L. Stedman
#7 “The Dreamers” by Karen Thompson Walker
#8 “Crooked Little Heart” by Anne Lamott
#9 “Truly Madly Guilty” by Liane Moriarty
#10 “The Archive of Alternate Endings” by Lindsey Drager
Read a related story:
In Praise of the Unpopular Omniscient POV: “All the Light We Cannot See”
Photo Credit: VisualHunt