Narrative voice and its attendent problems

There is no question that the identification and naming of particular narrative voices presents ongoing problems.  Even when a small group of classifications are used to help students, there are always voices that appear in a whole variety of works that often stump both teachers and students.

I asked a teacher and examiner, Brian Chanen, who both teaches IB students and has done scholarly research in narrative technique, for some advice about how to approach this in a practical way with IB students. Here’s a brief comment about his approach:

“I try to get them to sense what the narrator is doing in terms of where and when the narrator is. In other words, I like them to think about when Nick Carraway is supposedly or theoretically writing this all down. I try to get them to care little about the actual pronouns used and get to the more interesting notion of who is telling us this thing, when, and why that matters.”

Brian also provided me with some other references and a website that I think is very, very useful: