How common is the omniscient narrator these days?

[nancylebov]

From an essay about post-modernism:
One rarely sees the universal, omniscient narrator any more; one expects to ride the "novel" inside one of the character's heads.

I've noticed that getting inside the character's heads is more common-- first person is typical for urban fantasy-- but has third person omniscient actually become rare?

I don't know if there's an important difference between being inside one character's head, or in many characters' heads, as in Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire.

Link from haikujaguar.

Comments

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

That is a hair I will not split ;-)

I think there's a definitive continuum there, exactly how much the narrator knows, but I feel that the kind of first person who looks back on events, and who knows things that they could not have known in the moment is closer to omnniscient than it is to tight third/in-the-moment first, where you only put on the page things the viewpoint character knows.

'Omniscient' does not mean 'knows everything'. Well, it does if you take it literally, but not literarily - again, there's a spectrum. I use the term mainly to distinguish it from tight third (whether singular or multiple) - as soon as you describe events or give a non-POV character's thoughts, you have omni. You may have only a few diversions (the famous fox in LOTR), or the omniscient narrator may be able to delve into the minds of everything and everybody. It may be a narrator with a frame story whose knowledge it limited - or it may be a truly god-like voice that knows, potentially, _everything_.

And I think at this point the whole thing gets diverse enough that trying to classify it is probably pretty futile.