lantern-lit house greatly contributes to the readers sense of unease, and so helps to build the storys effectiveness. Another example is Lawrences “The Horse Dealers Daughter,” the description at the beginning of which contributes much to the atmosphere of the story.4. The importance of atmosphere in creating the settingBut it is a mistake to say that the atmosphere of a piece of fiction depends on the setting alone. (As illustrated in Shakespeares Hamlet, the dialogue at the very beginning of the play helps powerfully to establish the atmosphere of uncertainty, in addition to the settingthe cold midnight castle.) The vocabulary, the figures of speech, and the rhythm of the sentence also help define the general atmosphere, for by these factors the writer manages to control the kind of associations that come to the readers mind. Atmosphere also depends on character and action. In short, we may say that the atmosphere of fiction is the pervasive, general feeling, generated by a number of factors (setting, character, action, and style) that is characteristic of a given story or novel.Chapter Five Point of ViewThe issue of point of view is highly philosophical, because it concerns the relation between the novelist and the “facts” in the novel, the relation between the novelist and the reader, and the relation between the novel and the reader. The point of view is the attitude or outlook of a narrator or character in a piece of literature, or it is the relationship between the narrator and the narrated. Metaphorically, a point of view is a standpoint from which the narrator sees the story and how he intends the reader to see the story. When we open a novel, we open a window to life. What a vision the novel provides largely depends on the point of view.Fictional prose and point of viewAs we know there are at least levels of discourse to account for the language of fictional prose (no matter it is a novel or a short story), just because the narrator level intervenes between the character-character level and the author-reader level. From the diagram shown below you will see:Addresser 1 Message Addressee 1(Novelist) (reader)Addresser 2 Message Addressee 2(Narrator) (narratee)Addresser 3 Message Addressee 3(Character A) (Character B)This diagram only accounts for the novel “in general” in the sense that all three levels, and all three pairs of participants are needed to explain how the novel works as a form. But any particular novel may neutralize some of the distinctions, multiply others, or do both at the same time. The fact that there are six participants in the basic discourse structure for the novel automatically means that there are more viewpoints to be taken into account in the novel than in other genres (e.g. poetry). But the opportunities in particular novels for multiplying the number of viewpoints to be considered, and related to one another, are myriad. It is thus hardly surprising that the novel has become the genre where writers have explored viewpoints extensively.What is a narrator?A narrator is the one who tells the story, often called the storyteller. But the narrator is not necessary the novelist. Even when the novel is written in the first person, the “I” is not the novelist, but a person invented by the novelist. The logic is that a fictional world, if disturbed by a real person, will collapse.Kinds of Point of ViewPoint of view can be divide by the narrators relationship with the character, represented by the grammatical person: the first-person narrative and the third-person narrative.I-narratorsThe person who tells the story may also be a character in the fictional world of the story, relating the story after the event. In this case the critics call the narrator a FIRST-PERSON NARRATOR or I-NARRATOR because when the narrator refers to himself or herself in the story the first person pronoun I is used.In the first-narrative, the narrator appears in the novel as “I” or “me”. He may tell a story in which he himself is the hero as in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, or he may tell a story in which he is only a minor character as in The Great Gatsby. Anyway, the narrator is a participant in the events. By assuming the identity as “I”, the narrator endears himself to the reader while he has to sacrifice the privilege of omniscience.b. Third-person narratorsIf the narrator is not a character in the fictional world, he or she is usually called a THIRD-PERSON NARRATOR, because reference to all the characters in the fictional world of the story will involve the use of the third-person pronouns, he, she, it or they. This second main type of narrator is arguably the dominant narrator type.In the third-person narrative, the narrator does not actually ap