Prose: Narrative Technique and Non-fiction Forms
This domain tests how prose is narrated and how non-fiction persuades. Expect questions on point of view, characterisation, structure, and the rhetorical stance of essays, memoirs and speeches.
Narrative voice
- First person: restricted knowledge, built-in bias.
- Third person limited: one consciousness, told in third person.
- Omniscient: the narrator moves between minds and comments.
- Stream of consciousness: thought rendered without logical ordering.
- Free indirect discourse: third person that borrows a character's idiom, judgements and syntax without a reporting clause.
Character and setting
- Direct characterisation tells; indirect shows through action, speech and reaction.
- Round characters develop; flat characters stay fixed.
- Setting can be atmosphere, symbol or social index; say which one you mean.
Non-fiction forms
- Essay (formal or personal), memoir, biography, autobiography, travelogue, diary, letter, speech, reportage, polemic.
- For each, ask: purpose, audience, persona adopted, and the evidence offered.
Worked example
A third-person passage contains no 'he thought', yet the sentences take on a character's slang and irritated judgements. That is free indirect discourse. Identify it by the clash between third-person grammar and first-person style. Effect: intimacy with the character combined with ironic distance, since the narrator is not endorsing the view.
Traps that cost marks
- Equating the narrator with the author.
- Assuming a first-person narrator is reliable.
- Treating non-fiction as unshaped fact rather than crafted argument.
- Missing a frame narrative that changes who is speaking.