Replacing Omniscience: Superior Knowledge and Narratorial Access

ABSTRACT:In an article published in Narrative in 2004, Jonathan Culler rejected the concept of omniscience and called for a more fitting critical lexicon to replace it. But so far, this call remains largely unanswered. This essay seeks to provide such a replacement, but it aims to do so by maintaining a concept of superior knowledge, which can be defined as knowledge that could not typically be known by either a narrator of nonfiction or a fictional character. Superior knowledge has an unmistakable utility, one that can provide insight into authors' rhetorical strategies, specifically because, unlike omniscience, it does not purport to be all-encompassing. The model that this essay proposes argues that authors grant narrators access to different types and degrees of superior knowledge based on a principle of relevance. In addition to variance in the degree of access, the type of superior knowledge to which a narrator might have access falls into one of three categories: knowledge of characters and events (including interior thoughts), temporality, and spatiality. This essay, in addition to exploring the concepts of omniscience, superior knowledge, and narratorial access in theoretical terms, will look at how access to superior knowledge is employed in the following texts: Ian McEwan's Atonement, Tobias Wolff's "Bullet in the Brain," Robert Coover's "Going for a Beer," Edwidge Danticat's "Sunrise, Sunset," and Charles Yu's "Fable." The overall goal of this essay is to show the narratological benefit of the model of narratorial access to superior knowledge as a replacement for omniscience.