This is the third part in my series on narrative mode. I wrote about narrative voice briefly some months ago, in the context of narrative mode.

To review, narrative mode has three components:

1. Person - First ("I"), second ("you"), or third ("he").
2. Tense - Past, present, or future.
3. Voice - Objective, Limited, or Omniscient

(I’ll cite some examples of narrative mode in a later post.)

Narrative voice is not grammatical voice (i.e., active voice or passive voice), but a completely different animal. Narrative “voice” indicates what the narrator knows about the action in the story. Does the the narrator know only what he can observe (“objective voice”)? Or can he see into the thoughts of one (“limited voice”) or all (“omniscient voice”) of the characters?

Authors and literary analysts typically link narrative voice with narrative person. (See my previous post on person in narrative mode for more on first-person, third-person, and so forth.) But conceptually, at least from a writer’s perspective, voice is an independent concept, not really linked to person at all.