Abstract

The paper discusses in six parts the role of knowledge and omniscience in narration. The first part identifies kinds of knowledge which usually inform narratives, using modern and medieval narratives as examples. The second part focuses on the carrier of knowledge: it is the author, but also the narrator to whom omniscience is attributed. The third part describes the phenomenology of this knowledge which cannot be derived in a natural manner and traces it back in the history of narration. The concept of omniscience is defined in the fourth part and distinguished from divine omniscientia. Omniscience was ›discovered‹ as a characteristic of third-person narration only at the beginning of the 19th century – evidence of this is given in part V. Finally, part VI discusses if the concept of omniscience can apply to modern forms of representing the mental states of characters.