The narrator knows all and understands the various perspectives, sharing them with the reader in sections.Īlfred was fourteen years old, and tall like Tom. With each section, he changes his main character, offering a third person perspective on that main character’s thoughts and feelings. Ken Follett uses shifting third person omniscient narration in a more defined way in Pillars of the Earth. It had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and inclosing her in a sphere by herself. But the point which drew all eyes, and, as it were, transfigured the wearer,-so that both men and women, who had been familiarly acquainted with Hester Prynne, were now impressed as if they beheld her for the first time,-was that SCARLET LETTER, so fantastically embroidered and illuminated upon her bosom. Her attire, which, indeed, she had wrought for the occasion, in prison, and had modelled much after her own fancy, seemed to express the attitude of her spirit, the desperate recklessness of her mood, by its wild and picturesque peculiarity. It may be true, that, to a sensitive observer, there was something exquisitely painful in it. Those who had before known her, and had expected to behold her dimmed and obscured by a disastrous cloud, were astonished, and even startled, to perceive how her beauty shone out, and made a halo of the misfortune and ignominy in which she was enveloped. And never had Hester Prynne appeared more lady-like, in the antique interpretation of the term, than as she issued from the prison. She was lady-like, too, after the manner of the feminine gentility of those days characterized by a certain state and dignity, rather than by the delicate, evanescent, and indescribable grace, which is now recognized as its indication. She had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the sunshine with a gleam, and a face which, besides being beautiful from regularity of feature and richness of complexion, had the impressiveness belonging to a marked brow and deep black eyes. The young woman was tall, with a figure of perfect elegance, on a large scale. This is important for a novel in which public opinion plays such a major role: In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne makes use of third person omniscient narration to describe not just the feelings and thoughts of his main characters, but of the general public as well.

Objective narrator