"He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly." (Nick Carraway describing Gatsby, in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby) What narrative position is this?

"I was a discord in Gateshead Hall; I was like nobody there... a useless thing, incapable of serving their interest, or adding to their pleasure." (from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre) What position governs the passage?

"There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name." (from Kate Chopin's The Story of an Hour) What position does the narration use?

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." (the opening line of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina) Which position is signaled?

"The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees..." (the opening of Ernest Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants) What point of view is this?

"Emma could not forgive her." (Jane Austen, Emma, describing Emma's reaction to Jane Fairfax's guarded answers) What technique shapes the point of view?

"I might give alms to his body; but his body did not pain him; it was his soul that suffered, and his soul I could not reach." (the lawyer-narrator on Bartleby, in Herman Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivener) What can this narrator not know directly?

"Bobby Martin had already stuffed his pockets full of stones, and the other boys soon followed his example, selecting the smoothest and roundest stones." (from Shirley Jackson's The Lottery) What does this objective narration withhold?

"You must give me leave to flatter myself, my dear cousin, that your refusal of my addresses is merely words of course." (Mr. Collins, in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice) If the narration stays fixed on Mr. Collins's confidence, what is shut out?

"...at different sittings, as the housekeeper could spare time from more important occupations." (Lockwood, on hearing his neighbor's history from Nelly Dean, in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights) What limit does this frame create?

"True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?" (the opening line of Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart) What does this narration prevent?

"yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs" (Molly Bloom's interior monologue, in James Joyce's Ulysses) What does this stream of consciousness chiefly withhold?

"When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease—of the joy that kills." (the final line of Kate Chopin's The Story of an Hour) What does the limited center established earlier in the story make this ending line?

"Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger." (the ending of James Joyce's Araby) What does the boy's limited, retrospective narration accomplish?

"All right, then, I'll go to hell." (Huck, deciding not to turn in Jim, in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) What effect does Huck's limited, naive narration create?

"Vanity was the beginning and the end of Sir Walter Elliot's character; vanity of person and of situation." (the narrator, in chapter 1 of Jane Austen's Persuasion) What does the judging narrator create here?

"I am glad my case is not serious! But these nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing." (the narrator, in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper) What does this narration make the reader do?

"The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge." (the opening line of Edgar Allan Poe's The Cask of Amontillado) What does this first-person opening accomplish?

"And this also, said Marlow suddenly, has been one of the dark places of the earth." (the opening of Marlow's tale, framed within Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness) What effect does the frame have?

"If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life... we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence." (the narrator's aside, in George Eliot's Middlemarch) What does this narratorial reach establish?

"You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings." (Walton's opening letter, in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein) What does this epistolary opening do?

"That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life..." (Pip reflecting, in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations) What does the retrospective narrator create by pausing to address the reader directly?

"I had lost sight of her altogether, but Jim had found her again after long years, had renewed a friendship that meant a great deal to him." (the introduction's frame narrator, in Willa Cather's My Ántonia) What does this framing narrator's view reveal?

In Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter the narrator says of the pillory, "this scaffold... now, for two or three generations past, has been merely historical and traditionary among us." What does the widened perspective supply?

"Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." (the opening line of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway) What does this opening line's close, free-flowing attachment to Clarissa's voice do?