Concetti Chiave
- In the Victorian Age, Charles Darwin's works employed a third-person omniscient narrator to critique contemporary society.
- Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights" used dual narrators, creating a layered narrative perspective through emotionally involved and detached viewpoints.
- Robert Louis Stevenson featured a shifting narrative perspective with multiple narrators, including an omniscient narrator and characters providing personal accounts.
- The Modernist Movement introduced the stream of consciousness technique, rendering traditional narrators obsolete by focusing on characters' thoughts and memories.
- This evolution marks a shift from external narration to internal character exploration in literature.
The role of Narrator from the Victorian Age to Modernist Movement
During the beginning of Victorian Age the narrator in Charles Darwin’s works was a third-person omniscient narrator who shows clearly the author’s criticism of contemporary society.
Then Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights involves two narrators, one outside the action and the other a direct witness of the events; in this way the point of view shifts. In fact events are filtered twice: the first narrator Nelly, the housekeeper/family nurse, is emotionally involved in the story; the second Mr Lockwood, the city visitor, is more detached than Nelly but his knowledge of people and places is more superficial and distant.
In Stevenson’s works there is, like in Wuthering Heights, the shift of the narrative point of view, in fact there are three different narrators: the omniscient third person narrator who tells most of the story, Dr Lanyon who writes down his own version of the story and Dr Jekyll himself.
After, during the Modernist Movement, with the introduction of the stream of consciousness technique the figure of the narrator become obsolete and it replaced by direct or indirect presentation of the characters through feelings and memories.
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