Okay, I'm not sure if the fic I'm writing right now is in omniscient POV or just from River's POV, but I suppose there isn't all that much difference, is there?
But I don't think she ever has really usable long-range precognitive skills--if she did, f'rex, in the movie she would have said, Mal, it's kind of pointless knocking off that payroll considering the amount of Reavers we're gonna have in our face--and of course she would have warned him to wave ahead to Haven and warn the others.
But how often do omniscient narrators demonstrate precognition either? I mean every once and a while one comes across a "But little did she know...." but in general it destroys tension just as much.
If the omniscient narrator is writing in the past tense, then naturally the narrator knows everything that happened. Many Victorian novels ended with a wrap-up of the future lives of the characters and their children, because the narrator "knows" that Roger is going to lose his life bravely fighting for the Empire, or that Georgetta will have three children.
Well, the narrator doesn't really "know" anything--it's an author's construct, nyet? If we envision the narrator as a character--and I'm not sure we inevitably do that with omniscient--then we'd probably envision her as existing after the events of the novel, like we do with a first-person narrator, so there'd be no precognition necessary.
After all, even if it is from River's point of view, there's still a narrator in some sense, as its told in third person, and the narrator "knows" what River is thinking, but it'd be odd to say the narrator is psychic.
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Date: 2006-07-10 02:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2006-07-11 01:45 am (UTC)After all, even if it is from River's point of view, there's still a narrator in some sense, as its told in third person, and the narrator "knows" what River is thinking, but it'd be odd to say the narrator is psychic.