Literature: Fiction
The fiction questions ask about narrative technique, above all point of view, plus structure, characterization, and the major movements of the novel and short story.
Point of view is the highest-yield topic
- First person: the narrator says I, is limited to personal knowledge, and may be unreliable.
- Third-person omniscient: the narrator enters several minds and may editorialize.
- Third-person limited: the narrator stays inside one character's perceptions.
- Objective or dramatic: only speech and action are reported, with no interior access.
- Free indirect discourse: third person that absorbs a character's idiom and judgments without quotation marks (Austen, Flaubert, Woolf).
Structure and character
Freytag's pyramid runs exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, denouement, though modern fiction often omits the neat descent. Round and flat, static and dynamic describe characterization; foil and epiphany (Joyce's term) are frequent answers. Stream of consciousness renders unedited thought (Woolf, Joyce, Faulkner), while foreshadowing, motif, and symbol operate at the level of structure.
Movement map for the novel
Epistolary (Richardson's Pamela), picaresque (Don Quixote), Gothic (Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights), bildungsroman (Great Expectations), realism (Flaubert, Eliot, Tolstoy), naturalism (Zola; Crane's Maggie), modernism (Ulysses, Mrs Dalloway), postmodern metafiction (Barth, Calvino, Pynchon). For the short story, remember Poe's unity of effect, Maupassant, Chekhov's restraint, and O. Henry's twist ending.
Worked example
A passage narrates a village fair, then reports what three different characters secretly hope, and adds that none of them guessed what the evening would bring. Candidates often answer third-person limited because the tone feels close to one character. But the narrator accesses several minds and comments from outside the story, which is the definition of third-person omniscient; limited narration would never report what the others were thinking.
Traps
- Answering only third person when the stem wants limited versus omniscient.
- Calling a narrator unreliable and then assuming the author endorses that narrator's view.
- Using realism and naturalism interchangeably; naturalism adds determinism of heredity, environment, and social pressure.
- Confusing allegory, a systematic second meaning, with symbolism, which is suggestive rather than fixed.