A Writer's Notebook, Two-Thousand-And-Forty-Five

I have been thinking about narrative point of view quite a bit lately.  One thing that always fascinates me is considering how the early novels were all written such that the narrative was diegetic to the text.  That is to say, the text that conveyed the story was something which was said to exist within the world of the story itself in some form.  In Pamela, for example, Richardson employs the use of an epistolary form, allowing the reader to see the existence of the text itself as an artifact of the tale.  Now, this is very different than many modern stories in which we accept reading words that reflect the mind of a character as it exists in the moment.  Faulkner's stream of consciousness is a clear example of this distinction, but even many works of genre fiction rely on our accepting reading a narrative that by its nature cannot and does not exist within the text.  I think there is a great deal more to consider in this, but I am just beginning my explorations at the moment.

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