After the Narrator

Why the fall of third-person omniscient signals a crisis in how we read, think, and relate to others—living or dead.

I was unsettled to learn that many young readers today struggle with third-person omniscient narration. Which seems reflected in the fact that the Omniscient POV has effectively dropped out of fashion over the last few years. Reading omniscient narration demands the capacity to situate oneself in relation to multiple consciousnesses, to hold intention apart from action, and to understand what is said in light of what is not. To grapple with tone, distance, discretion, and irony (inside and outside the text). These are precisely the mental faculties shown to be cultivated by literary fiction and, may I dare say, by civilised society. The loss of this form, then, is not neutral, and cannot be simply reduced to a basic issue of reading skills.

This difficulty clashes sharply with the experience (I think many still have) associated with literary discovery. For anyone drawn to narrative in its deepest sense—not just plot, but the architecture of interiority—third-person omniscient was never simply a convention. Whether in medieval romanesque literature or the nineteenth-century novel, the narrator was a figure of integration: the one who held disparate perspectives together, sustained moral and psychological nuance (sometimes even at odds with the author’s known beliefs), and allowed readers to move fluidly between the real and the imagined, the individual and the collective. Literary criticism, too, is premised on this presence highly complex and ambiguous, across genres. Even the post-structuralist tradition—often caricatured as hostile to the author—relied on the figure of the narrator as an organising tension, still structuring the reader’s experience. Barthes, Kristeva, Foucault, Genette, etc.: none could dispense with the voice that arranges, withholds, and frames.

Writing off the disappearance of the narrator as a shift in literary fashion is too convenient. Its rapid vanishing indicates, I think, a diminishment of the conditions under which literature becomes reflective. In other words, a more fundamental estrangement from a form of thought that is essential to the way we enter and shape our own culture.

Culture in whatever form (arts, thought, history, religion), if it means anything, begins not with access or recognition but with attention. Its basic movements are meditation and conversation, which are fundamentally “slow” and involve risk-taking. Importantly, neither follows automatically from simple exposure to art or literature on art. Because this process doesn’t work like medicine on a sick person (simple cause-consequence effect). Reading great works, seeing great things, listening to great music does not in itself yield cultivation. If it did, then every proofreader would be the finest judges of literature. In practice, some of them have become the new censors—enforcers of a moral vocabulary rather than caretakers of complexity.

The idea that culture can be “systematised” through better “content delivery”—curated through checklists, rubrics, and “inclusive” syllabi—is terribly mistaken. There is no substitute for the inner labour of discernment. Reading, like listening, cannot be outsourced. Nor can it be reduced to ideological consumption. One may “read up” on art, but unless that knowledge is metabolised—contemplated, wrestled with, admired—it remains lettre morte.

Both interior monologue and shared dialogue are attempts to sort through this; “sorting” not in the scholastic or bureaucratic sense. Which impressions merit attention? What belongs to this idea? What feeling, what tone, what claim? Which images endure? How are we being formed—or deformed—by what we take in? That is how culture reshapes the personality; it develops the self by offering the vicarious experience of art and thoughts. It puts experience in order, it gently discipline the imagination through the specific mode of aesthetic experience and knowledge.

This is at the root of original meaning of the words amateur and dilettante: those who act “out of love” and “delight”. Today, those terms have been twisted into ridicule. But the original impulse remains essential. The amateur, in the noble sense, seeks not mastery but intimacy. The dilettante lingers, tastes, returns.

Walter Benjamin is a good case in point for observing cultural seriousness, rooted in attention and care, not systems. He was not a philosopher, nor a professional critic. He inhabited a (vanishing) secret, third space: one animated by love. As Hannah Arendt noted, his work defied classification because it resisted reduction. Contrary to Adorno’s exegesis—explaining superstructures always downstream of economics—Benjamin’s readings of Baudelaire, of allegory, of memory, were acts of invocation. He treated texts as if they breathed.

What may happens when we no longer enter “in conversation” with art and others? We lose two forms of communion: first, with the living; and second, with the dead. Conversation is eclipsed by shoptalk: exchanges in which facts circulate without reflection, and opinion is presented as insight. Admiration is re-coded as naïveté, since it rests on the idea—now heretical—that greatness exists, and can be recognised.

This loss is made worse by our cultural environment. The dominant narratives of our time do not prepare us for submission to another voice. They prepare us for display. From TikTok clips to the “relatable” anti-hero (the trend of rehabilitating villains for their backstories or Maleficent Syndrome, as it’s been called), our culture obsessively affirms the self, but not the self-in-conversation. Without a sense of alterity, even the artist becomes suspect. Their work requires no justification, because the very idea of judgment has been hollowed out.

Meanwhile, images proliferate. The overabundance of image over text, fashioned on short-lived trends that keep fleeting away, clutters the memory and cheapens everything. I think that, on similar premises, the same can be said of the scholarly world. The overabundance or scholarship, niche names, schools of thoughts and doctrines clutters the mind. Ditching the amateur critic embodied by Walter Benjamin and others, Academia today specialises in the overproduction of “specialists”, each refining their niche, each embedded in their own epistemology. There is no common ground. No one is wrong, because no one is asked to be answerable. Conversation is aborted in advance.

The decline of “deep literacy” and “deep reading”, as Adam Garfinkle argues, reconfigures the mind. Mary Harrington picks up the thread to ask: “If ‘deep reading’ produced democracy as its governing political form, what can we expect to see associated with its networked digital successor?” Speed replaces sequence. Recognition substitutes for knowledge. In such a world, the slow work of narration—with its patient interweaving of lives, moods, intentions—comes to seem foreign, even frustrating. Running away from the complexities of the omniscient narrator, young people may then prefer “a less abstract, re-personalized form of social and political authority concentrated in a ‘great’ authoritarian leader” (Garfinkle).