Third-person narration

In third-person narrative, "the narration refers to all characters with third person pronouns like he or she," avoiding the first- and second-person forms. The article splits the mode by knowledge: the omniscient variant gives the narrator "an overarching perspective, seeing and knowing everything that happens within the world of the story," typical of nineteenth-century fiction, while the limited (or close) variant stays restricted to one character's perspective, as in Coetzee's Disgrace. A second axis divides subjective third person, which conveys characters' thoughts, feelings and opinions, from objective, which reports only observable events. Multiple-viewpoint novels from The English Patient to A Song of Ice and Fire rotate the limited form across chapters.

Third is the default mode of commercial and serialized fiction because it scales: chapters can move between viewpoint characters without collapsing into slips, provided each scene holds one viewpoint. The close end of the mode is deep POV and the wide end is the omniscient narrator.