First-person narrators are usually designated as "reliable" (the reader can trust their perceptions of events) or as "unreliable" (the reader perceives or understands something other or something different than the narrator; this discrepancy usually creates irony).

An example of an unreliable first-person narrator would be found in Toni Cade Bambera's "Gorilla, My Love."

An example of second-person narration would be found in Lorrie Moore's "How."

Third-person narrators do not participate in the action of the story and are often further classified as being:

Objective: they report from a perspective external to the minds of all characters.

An example of objective omniscience would be found in Hemingway's "Hills like White Elephants."

Omniscient, that is, "all knowing," if they are able to know all the characters' thoughts and feelings (although they may not tell the reader all that they know).

Limited omniscient narrators selectively admit us to some characters' minds and not others.

In Ann Beattie's "Janus," we are only admitted into the mind of Andrea, the main character.

Omniscient narrators sometimes shift the point of view from one character's consciousness to another's in the course of a fictional work.

Seymour Chatman, a critic who has written extensively about point of view, refers to this process of viewing events from inside a character's mind as using a narrative "filter." Authors use various techniques for taking us inside a consciousness or showing us how things are viewed through that character's filter in a story with third-person narration.

ex. "Smith felt that he was wrong to have done that."

a. Direct tagged quotation: third-person narrator can quote the character's thoughts directly, inside quotation marks and using "tag" phrases like "he said" or "she thought."

ex. "I was wrong to have done that," Smith thought.

b. Indirect tagged quotation: third-person narrator shifts the character's thoughts and the tag phrases into 3rd-person pronouns and usually drops quotation marks.

ex. He was wrong to have done that, he thought.

c. Indirect untagged quotation (also known as free quotation, indirect discourse, or free indirect style): the quotation is indirect because the pronouns are 3rd person and "free" because there are no tags like "he said."

ex. He was wrong to have done that.

In the context of a particular story, one should be able to understand that the words reported in this last example are Smith's actual thoughts, even if there are no quotation marks around them in the text. Out of context, however, it would be difficult to tell whether "He was wrong to have done that" represents Smith's judgment or that of the third-person narrator. And sometimes it is difficult to discern whose voice and judgments we are hearing in a specific story. Learning to decide how to discriminate the narrator's judgments from the judgments made by a character is important to determining how you as a reader are supposed to judge that character--whether, for instance, you are supposed to agree with the character's judgment or not. As with unreliable first-person narration, discrepancies between what the character thinks or understands and what the reader understands create an opportunity for irony at the character's expense in some forms of third-person narration.

This technique attempts to duplicate the flow of thought and sense impressions as they occur in a character's mind. Often ordinary grammar and punctuation break down in the effort to capture the flux of perceptions in that character's consciousness.

William Faulkner uses stream of consciousness in the first paragraph of "Barn Burning."