How literary text reading is influenced by narrative voice and focalization: evidence from eye movements

ABSTRACT

A fictional story is always narrated from a certain narrative voice and mode of focalization. These core narrative techniques have a major impact on how readers interpret the narrative plot and connect with the characters. This study used eye-tracking to investigate how classic narrative reading is affected by narrative voice and focalization. The results showed that the third-person narrative voice was read more slowly than the first-person narrative voice, especially when the narrative was presented with internal focalization. Importantly, the transition from a first-person to a third-person narrative voice generally resulted in longer reading times, whereas a switch from a third-person to a first-person narrative voice only yielded limited benefits in terms of reduced reading time. These findings provide direct evidence to support the assumption that there is a distinction between the first-person narration and the third-person narration and demonstrate the important role of narrative voice and focalization in understanding narrative texts.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Professor Jie Zhang for his invaluable support in conducting this study. We are also grateful to Tianyue Wang and Yiyi Lu for their assistance in collecting and analyzing the data. We are thankful to the reviewer for prompting us to consider this important question.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the Jiangsu Social Science Fund (Grant No. [23YYB010]), the Grand for the Social Science Foundation of the Higher Education Institutions of Jiangsu Province (Grant No. [2021SJA0086]), the High-quality Research Project on the Application of Social Science in Jiangsu Province (Grant No. [22SWB-17]), and the National Social Science Foundation of China (Key Program: Grant No. [18AYY010]; Major Program: Grant No. [21&ZD288]).