Who is the narrator, can she or he read minds, and, more importantly, can we trust her or him?
Third Person (Limited Omniscient)
Timescape uses a third-person limited omniscient narrative technique, but it does so in an unrestrained way. Now, that may sound like a paradox, but if reading this novel has taught us anything, it's that we should keep calm and embrace the paradox.
First, let's consider what a third person limited omniscient narrator is, which we can do best by looking at this with an example:
"It's not that bad," Gordon murmured. Somehow Cliff had hit upon a precise similarity. Gordon had kept pigeons on the roof for a time, just like Brando, and had gone up there to talk to them on Saturday nights when he didn't have a date, which was pretty often. After a while, he had convinced himself that dating on Saturday night didn't have to be the center of a teenage life and then sometime after that he had got rid of the pigeons.
They were filthy, anyway. (13.50-51)
This example takes place during a three-way conversation between Penny, Cliff, and Gordon, but look over it again, and you'll notice that it is only Gordon's inner thoughts and feelings the narrator provides the reader. When Cliff mentions On the Waterfront, the narrator doesn't zoom into his mind to provide us his thoughts on the subject matter.
But it does zoom into Gordon's mind and tells us what's bouncing around in there. We learn about his association with pigeons and get the low down on his teenage memories. Finally, the terse phrase "They were filthy anyway" informs us that he still might be a wee-bit upset about the whole high school thing.
When the narrator restricts itself to just one character's point of view, we call this limited omniscient. It's third person narration because the narrator isn't a part of the plot party like, say, Nick in The Great Gatsby. Nick is totally at those swinging Gatsby parties and totally a first-person narrator as a result.
And that is how we deduce that this is a third-person limited omniscient narrator. But why do we say Timescape is unrestrained in the limited approach?
This novel's narrator invades the perspective of several different characters. Sometimes we get Renfrew's point of view, other times Peterson's, and still others, we hang with Gordon. What keeps the narrator limited is that in each chapter, he or she picks a perspective character and sticks with them. It doesn't go jumping around between characters on the fly, and once the narrator chooses a character, we're along for that ride until the next chapter.