Point of View

Point of View

Third-Person Omniscient

Riddle us this, Caped Crusader: what happens when you have traditional third person omniscient narrative narrated by an actual god?

The presumption with usual third-person narrative is that we're seeing it from the eyes of God: able to go anywhere and see anything so long as it moves the narration forward. Cheekier scholars have suggested that it makes the author or movie director something of a god, since he or she can move our perceptions in a similar manner. (And we're pretty sure at least some of them—*cough, Orson Welles, *cough—considered themselves gods.)

Either way, we're getting our narration straight from Odin, who gives us a voice-over early on to explain how his peeps used to do things back in the day…and to set up some rules for this big universe that they're trying to show us.

It gives a funky wrinkle to the otherwise standard-issue narrative technique, since he (with a little help from Heimdall) can probably see exactly what we're seeing and—if he's literally telling us the story like the voice-over suggests—guiding our sight to where we need to go.

That's taking deus ex machina to a whole new level.