Third-person Narrator Research Articles

Research on the Matching Effect of Social Media Advertising Appeal and Narrative Person: Evidence from China

The burgeoning landscape of social media advertising also faces a myriad of challenges. This study aims to explore the interactive effect of advertising appeal (abstract vs. concrete) and narrative person (first-person vs. third-person) on consumer attitudes towards social media advertising. Based on the construal level theory, this study uses secondary data and two experiments to investigate the interactive effect between advertising appeal and narrative person in social media advertising and the moderated mediating role of information processing fluency. The result reveals that a harmonious match between advertising appeal and narrative person enhances consumer fluency in processing advertising information, thereby improving consumer attitudes towards advertising. Specifically, for advertisements with concrete appeal, first-person narratives are more conducive to enhancing consumer attitudes towards advertising. Conversely, for advertisements with abstract appeal, third-person narratives are more advantageous. This study provides theoretical insights into social media advertising narration, with practical implications for marketers to advance social media advertising design.

Navigating the global health seas: A personal odyssey through the depths of COVID-19

This study offers an extensive perspective on the COVID-19 pandemic through a unique lens, blending personal narratives with informative analysis. Owing to strained public health systems, individuals faced emblematic struggles – such as awaiting medical attention in overwhelmed emergency rooms and securing testing appointments–which symbolized universal experiences. Through depersonalized yet interconnected stories, this study elucidates systemic vulnerabilities in global health infrastructures. An examination of socioeconomic disparities through third-person narratives reveals communities grappling with layoffs and limited health-care access. This study seeks to offer an analytical yet empathetic exploration of the broader socioeconomic impact of COVID-19. The objective portrayal of the pursuit for equitable vaccine access mirrors global challenges in scheduling and supply shortages. Furthermore, the personal narratives highlight the connections forged, the information shared, and the resources pooled, emphasizing a shared commitment to overcoming challenges together. This study concludes with a collective call for adopting a resilient, equitable, and united approach to global health in which informed perspectives of collective struggle converge for a better future.

(Im)possible Facilitating Environments: the Spaces of Family in Sally Rooney’s <i>Normal People</i>

Building upon the concept of the “good enough” facilitating environment developed by pediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, this article aims to analyze the family relationships depicted in the novel Normal People by Sally Rooney. Through the contrast of experiences, the author develops two distinct family environments — for Connell Waldron, the space is nurturing, while for Marianne Sheridan, it is marked by violence. This narrative choice allows for reflections on the impacts of these spaces on the emancipation process of the protagonists. They initiate a romantic relationship in their final year of high school and, amidst ups and downs, remain intertwined in each other's lives until the end of college, when they must navigate separate paths. Through the dialogues between the protagonists and the information provided by the third-person narrator, which alternates between the two points of view, this article aims to analyze how the family dynamics of each character influence their self-perception and the choices they make over the four-year period covered in the novel.

What I Can Do with the Right Version of You: The Impact of Narrative Perspective on Reader Immersion, and How (in)Formal Address Pronouns Influence Immersion Reports

Previous research has shown that readers experience stronger immersion while reading first-person narratives than third-person narratives, but whether this difference in processing is time-sensitive remains unclear. We report on a self-paced reading experiment in which French participants read short stories in first and in third person. Additionally, participants were directly addressed with either formal or informal second-person pronouns in the final sentence of the narrative, as well as in a subsequent (off-line) questionnaire soliciting post-story immersion reports. The suitability of a particular pronoun of address depends on the social context, and misplaced use can impact the way in which people perceive and assess a particular situation. We did not find significant differences between reading times with first- or third-person pronouns, but participants reported higher immersion and emotional engagement after reading first-person stories than third-person stories. Moreover, the effect of story perspective on reported immersion only occurred when participants were addressed with formal second-person pronouns. We take these findings as evidence for an effect of first- versus third-person pronouns on immersion via perspective shifts. Moreover, we argue that the effect of being addressed with an unexpected (in this case, informal) pronoun can overrule such an effect, while being addressed with an expected (in this case, formal) pronoun can be conducive of it. This finding highlights the importance of research into the impact of pronouns of address.

Joseph Conrad’s reluctant raconteurs

Abstract A commonality among so many of Conrad’s narrators is their reluctance to reveal important information regarding the stories they tell. These narrators delay, obscure, or withhold, sometimes partly and sometimes entirely, crucial components to the tales they tell. This essay investigates why these narrators behave as they do. In some instances (as in Falk), the narrator looks to recreate in his listeners (and the reader) his bewilderment as to Falk’s refusal to tow his ship and later to Falk’s “misfortune,” as Falk terms it. In other instances, such as Typhoon and Suspense, the narrator requires the reader to supply the missing information. On the other hand, in Nostromo, for example, the third-person narrator, despite knowing so very much, regularly relies on legend, hearsay, and other similar sources in narrating the novel, thereby questioning the idea of absolute knowledge, positing instead a contingent knowledge.

Gesture's Role in the Communication of Adults With Different Types of Aphasia.

Adults with aphasia gesture more than adults without aphasia. However, less is known about the role of gesture in different discourse contexts for individuals with different types of aphasia. In this study, we asked whether patterns of speech and gesture production of individuals with aphasia vary by aphasia and discourse type and also differ from the speech and gestures produced by adults without aphasia. We compared the amount, diversity, and complexity of speech and gesture production in adults with anomic or Broca's aphasia and adults with no aphasia (n = 20/group) in their first- versus third-person narratives. Adults with Broca's aphasia showed the lowest performance in their amount, diversity, and complexity of speech production, followed by adults with anomic aphasia and adults without aphasia. This pattern was reversed for gesture production. Speech and gesture production also varied by discourse context. Adults with either type of aphasia used a lower amount of and less diverse speech in third-person than in first-person narratives; this pattern was also reversed for gesture production. Overall, our results provide evidence for a compensatory role of gesture in aphasia communication. Adults with Broca's aphasia, who showed the greatest speech production difficulties, also relied most on gesture, and this pattern was particularly pronounced in the third-person narrative context.

The image of the taiga in the ballads of Leonid Zaval’nyuk

The article is devoted to the study of the ballad genre in the lyrics of the poet Leonid Zaval’nyuk (1930-2010). The study focuses on the analysis of “The Taiga Ballad” and “The Ballad of Melting Snow,” which were included in the collection “Beyond the Receding Horizon” (1956). These ballads open and end the ballad cycle, consisting of five works. The plot of both ballads develops in the artistic space of the taiga, which becomes a place of moral testing for the heroes. Leonid Zaval’nyuk was the first to introduce the image of the taiga into the ballad. The decanonisation of the ballad genre occurs in the 19th century. Leonid Zaval’nyuk’s works not only preserve ballad traditions (third-person narration, appeal to archetypal plots, mixing Christian and pagan beliefs, personification of natural forces, the special role of the season and time of day in the development of the plot), but also the evolution of the genre takes place (refusal of the mystical component, increasing the realism of the narrative, first-person narration). The decanonisation of the ballad genre occurs in the 19th century. Leonid Zaval’nyuk turned to the ballad genre throughout his entire career. The motif of moral testing became one of the leading ones for the poet.

Vilifying apartheid perpetrators through narrative devices

Mandla Langa’s debut novel, Tenderness of Blood, received no critical review compared with his later works of fiction. To close this gap, I will provide critical analysis focussing on Langa’s use of narrative devices that function to generate meaning focussed on specific issues, themes, and topics vilifying apartheid perpetrators, which has been interpreted as Langa’s chosen means of overthrowing apartheid. These devices will be drawn from Gérard Genette’s Narrative Discourse and Narrative Discourse Revisited along with Mikhail Bakhtin’s narrative theories of the Dialogic Imagination. This entails narrational strategies of the extradiegetic and intradiegetic, respectively, deployed by the anonymous third-person narrator and Mkhonto, the protagonist. These strategies render the text as a multi-voiced polyphonic narrative that aims to accentuate the plight of Mkhonto in his opposition to South Africa’s apartheid injustices from two different and complementary narrative perspectives. In addition to the narrational strategies, there is an employment of devices such as times of narration in simultaneous, subsequent, and interpolated narration, which enable the situating of the story in time of its ‘presentness’ and moments of the action.Contribution: This article highlights the plight of, and challenges experienced by the characters, and is helpful in generating sympathy for the events, especially for Mkhonto and his people in the struggle to overthrow apartheid.

Remember lest we forget: the link between long-term memory and narrative, empathy and previous knowledge in Israel

ABSTRACT One of the most demanding challenges teachers and educators face is the need to engage their students with ‘difficult knowledge’ topics. The need to unwrap controversial issues that are the subject of cultural or historical debate, without oversimplifying them, making them accessible and their morals apparent, all while committing them to memory, is an ongoing challenge for most pedagogical approaches. How to teach difficult knowledge in the classroom, especially the topic of the Holocaust, is a question that all educators in Israel face during their career. A common teaching tool is the use of film in both first and third-person narrative. Focused on the effect of narrative perspective in the teaching of difficult knowledge, this article examines the effect of first-person and third-person narrative in film on both short- and long-term memory among a cohort of students enrolled at a college of education in Israel. It also seeks to provide news insights into this issue by looking at the connection between empathy, previous knowledge, and perspective taking.

Identifying the Active Ingredients of Climate Change Narratives: A Model of Temporal Perspective, Narrator Perspective, and Psychological Distance

Psychological distance has long been regarded as a primary obstacle to driving pro-environmental changes. This study seeks to explore narrative attributes that can be strategically harnessed to solve the distal nature of climate change. By adopting a 2 (retrospective vs. prospective temporal perspective) × 2 (first-person vs. third-person narrator perspective) factorial experimental design, the findings suggested that climate change narratives in retrospective and first-person perspectives manifest superiority in reducing psychological distance, with narrative involvement as the explanatory mechanism. In addition, the two forms of narrative involvement, namely transportation and identification, play distinct roles in addressing various types of psychological distance.

Reading Resistance in Damon Galgut’s The Promise: An Analysis of Narrative Perspective

ABSTRACT This paper concentrates on the self-reflexive and multi-voiced narration in Damon Galgut’s The Promise. Adopting Elleke Boehmer’s analysis of postcolonial poetics and Derek Attridge’s notion of resistance, the discussion shows how Galgut’s novel both invites and resists modes of reading associated with the third-person narrative, specifically the principles of detachment and narratorial omniscience. The first part of this article investigates the narrator’s complex interaction with the protagonists and the narratees. One feature of narration in The Promise is that it shows the narrator as belonging to the same racial group as the protagonists, at the same time seeking to transcend the limitations of their viewpoint. The fact that the protagonists’ racially inflected perception of the world is projected onto the narratees impacts the readers’ reception of the narrative text, denying them a stable subject position from which to judge the thoughts and actions of the protagonists. The second part of the article is devoted to the treatment of narratorial omniscience, which is consciously and self-reflexively limited by Galgut’s decision to focus on the perspective of white South Africans. It is shown that the narrator’s limitations direct our attention to the boundary between the said and the unsaid, thus resisting modes of reading connected with the realist novel. The conclusion of the article considers The Promise in the wider context of the liberal humanist tradition, arguing that the novel can be situated in the broad tradition of reconstructed liberalism, though it should be kept in mind that Galgut’s treatment of this stance is characterized chiefly by cautiousness and political realism.

Clickbait modernism

ABSTRACT Over recent years terms such as autofiction, postcritique and postfiction have been repurposed to designate a moment in the history of the novel, and in culture more broadly, to do with the distribution of narrative authority. These terms have also helped articulate a contemporary double bind whereby impatience with the knowingness of third-person narration meets an equal and opposite impatience with ideology critique, whose unmasking of textual or authorial ideology is itself viewed as excessively knowing. This article reconnects such a discursive predicament to the enduring problem of modernism’s relation to realism. Through a consideration of public acts of reading in James Joyce’s ‘A Painful Case’ (pub.1914), Anna Burns’s Milkman (2018) and Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This (2021), it considers the place of realism in relation to both the current impact of the internet and the historical memory of literary modernism. It argues that if we want to think about modernism’s continued relevance to contemporary cultural forms we should consider how the devices of realism imperilled at the end of the nineteenth century remain differently imperilled in today’s online world.

Narrating the Nation: Language and the Landscape of Time in Scego’s Adua

In Adua (2015), Igiaba Scego illuminates the legacy of Italian colonialism by chronicling the intergenerational trauma passed from Zoppe, a Somali translator working for Italians during the fascist ventennio, to his daughter Adua, an actress exploited by the Italian film industry. This study analyzes Scego’s use of perspective to represent fundamentally different experiences of time in Adua, emphasizing Scego’s unique contribution to a postcolonial aesthetics that combats colonial temporality as defined by Johannes Fabian. In Time and the Other, Fabian asserts that time has not yet been decolonized, and thus has not been deconstructed as an ideological instrument of power. Scego unflinchingly documents the effects of colonial chronopolitics through her third-person narration of Zoppe’s perspective, which deteriorates into a series of invectives that portray his complete arrest in time. Adua endures similar traumas, but she embraces narration as a means of refashioning her voice and restoring community. In depicting Adua’s story as a triumph over colonial temporality, Scego champions first-person narration as a tool for the construction of a postcolonial chronopolitics that decolonizes time in order to work towards a more ethical geopolitical order.

Sportify: Question Answering with Embedded Visualizations and Personified Narratives for Sports Video.

As basketball's popularity surges, fans often find themselves confused and overwhelmed by the rapid game pace and complexity. Basketball tactics, involving a complex series of actions, require substantial knowledge to be fully understood. This complexity leads to a need for additional information and explanation, which can distract fans from the game. To tackle these challenges, we present Sportify, a Visual Question Answering system that integrates narratives and embedded visualization for demystifying basketball tactical questions, aiding fans in understanding various game aspects. We propose three novel action visualizations (i.e., Pass, Cut, and Screen) to demonstrate critical action sequences. To explain the reasoning and logic behind players' actions, we leverage a large-language model (LLM) to generate narratives. We adopt a storytelling approach for complex scenarios from both first and third-person perspectives, integrating action visualizations. We evaluated Sportify with basketball fans to investigate its impact on understanding of tactics, and how different personal perspectives of narratives impact the understanding of complex tactic with action visualizations. Our evaluation with basketball fans demonstrates Sportify's capability to deepen tactical insights and amplify the viewing experience. Furthermore, third-person narration assists people in getting in-depth game explanations while first-person narration enhances fans' game engagement.

When "I" or "S/He" uses the product: the impact of narrative perspective on consumers' brand attitudes in storytelling ads.

Storytelling ad is presented from one or more narrative perspectives. Narrative perspective, which can alter the way in which the plot is physiologically or psychologically perceived, can significantly affect consumer experience. This study conducts three experiments with 526 participants to analyze the influencing mechanism of narrative perspective (first- versus third-person) on consumers' brand attitudes in storytelling ads of products with different involvement (high versus low). (a) Narrative perspective (first- versus third-person) exerts persuasive effects on consumer brand attitudes; (b) Processes of social presence and self-brand connection explain the effects of narrative perspective on brand attitudes; (c) When product involvement is high, the use of the first-person narrative perspective in storytelling ads will result in a more positive brand attitude than the use of third-person narrative will; With lower product involvement, there is no significant difference in the impact on brand attitudes regardless of narrative perspective (first-person versus third-person). This research finds that different narrative perspectives significantly impact the persuasiveness of advertising. Boundary conditions exist for the effect of narrative persuasion, and product involvement moderates the effect of narrative perspective on brand attitudes.

Misreadings, Self-Misprisions, and Fabricated Resolutions in Joyce’s “The Dead”

Abstract: Joyce’s “The Dead” contains a number of partial and misleading narratives related in an unexpected manner, and as such greatly rewards a narrative- centered analysis. Misinterpretation is general in this work; one might argue that the text is primarily a record of Gabriel’s repeated misinterpretations of the people and narratives around him. This is true of the women he interacts with; most egregiously, he does not even imagine that his wife has a story independent of her life with him. An attention to narrative and interpretation in turn leads to a different reading of the ending of the text. Far from being a definitive epiphany that finally reveals the bitter truth about himself and his marriage, Gabriel’s closing convictions are yet additional misinterpretations about his marriage, his situation, and his life, and rather Romantic ones at that, which the reader trained by this text would be wise to question and reject in favor of a more skeptical conclusion. In addition, the kind of third-person narration with a single focalizer for nearly all of the text lends itself to the kind of misleading conclusions which Margot Norris has identified; this strategy reproduces and even re-enacts the text’s larger hermeneutical dramas, as the reader is challenged to see through a rhetoric that naturalizes an ideological perspective that seems untroubled by imperial rule.

Post-Postfeminist Witnessing: Sexual Violence and 9/11 in Claire Vaye Watkins’s “Rondine Al Nido”

Abstract “Rondine al Nido” is part of the Nevada-based first short story collection by Claire Vaye Watkins, Battleborn (2012). The third-person narrator focuses on a woman in her thirties who recounts her lover the experience of being sexually abused when she ran away at sixteen years old with a former friend to Las Vegas. Set in the backdrop of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the story dwells on the moment when the two girls could have escaped from the hotel room of their abusers but decided not to. The embedded story exemplifies Rosalind Gill’s idea of the late 1990 s and early 2000 s postfeminism (2008), and compliance with male standards of a pornified sexual experience (Nikunen 2007). I argue that the use of temporality in the story allows for a revision of gender demands and stereotypes reinforced through nationalistic discourses surrounding 9/11, and foregrounds a “crisis ordinariness” (Berlant 2011: 10) with regards to sexual violence. Further, understanding the act of the telling as an ethical encounter with the Other allows the narrator to come to terms with her younger self and the friend whom she did not protect from sexual violence in the past.1

The Stylistic Features of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man from the Perspective of Corpus Stylistics

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was Irish writer James Joyces first published novel. The novel tells the story of the protagonist Stephen grow from a little child to an artist. Although Joyce uses third-person narration in the novel, he describes the surrounding society from Stephens point of view everywhere. When Stephen grew up, his thoughts gradually matured, and he gradually changed from obedience to rebellion. The stylistic features of the novel also changed a lot in this process. Corpus stylistics is a scientific stylistic research method which combines qualitative research with quantitative research. With the support of corpus stylistics, the author studies and analyzes the stylistic changes in the novels during Stephens childhood, adolescence and youth, and explains the causes of the corresponding characteristics. Through profound analysis, the author finally draws the conclusion: With the growth of the protagonist, the vocabulary of the novel becomes increasingly difficult and rich, the use of sentence grammar gradually becomes mature, and the difficulty of the text gradually increases. The style of the novel is closely related to the growth of the characters and the theme of each stage.

An experimental investigation of the interaction of narrators’ and protagonists’ perspectival prominence in narrative texts

Abstract In this paper, we present the results of an experiment investigating the effect of different narrative situations on the availability of locally prominent protagonists as anchor for Free Indirect Discourse (FID). We created items in three conditions: condition A featured a neutral third-person narrator, condition B a homodiegetic first-person narrator and condition C a prominent, evaluative third-person narrator. Participants read several short text segments all ending with FID and were asked to rate the acceptability of the FID sentence. The results revealed that condition B received significantly lower ratings than the other two conditions, whereas there was no significant difference between conditions A and C. An additional study, in which participants had to choose if the thought expressed by FID belonged to the narrator or the protagonist, showed that there was a strong tendency to choose the protagonist as perspectival center in all three conditions. The results from Exp. 1 prove that while the presence of a homodiegetic first-person narrator strongly constrains a locally prominent protagonist’s availability as anchor for FID, it is not similarly affected by the presence of a globally prominent third-person narrator. This further confirms that narrative texts possess an inherent potential for multiperspectivity.

From witness to accomplice: the manipulation of readers’ empathy through consciousness representation in Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley

Abstract Within the field of narrative empathy studies, the concept of “negative empathy,” meaning a sharing of emotions with morally negative characters, has become increasingly discussed. Through the examination of The Talented Mr Ripley (1955) by Patricia Highsmith, this article contributes new insights into narratological and stylistic devices eliciting readers’ empathy. This study analyses responses from expert and non-expert readers to understand how they conceptualise empathy and qualify their engagement with the novel’s eponymous character. I argue that the novel’s figural narration, which involves extensive displays of the character’s mind and silencing the narrator’s moral guidance, invites empathy. Finally, I suggest that Highsmith manipulates her readers through three related stylistic techniques (free indirect discourse, stylistic contagion and equivocal sentences), which blur the lines between the third-person narration and the character’s inner discourse. By insidiously presenting the hero’s behaviour as sensible and justified, Highsmith persuades readers to become not only witnesses but accomplices to Ripley’s crimes.