- Define and explain Studying the Novel in your own words
- Use key terms such as narrative voice accurately
- Apply what you have learned to new examples and questions
- Avoid the common mistakes learners make with this topic
This lesson focuses on Studying the Novel: analyse narrative voice, character and structure in prose fiction.
Analyse narrative voice, character and structure in prose fiction.
Key ideas
Shakespeare wrote for the stage
His plays are scripts, not novels — meaning lives in performance. A soliloquy is a character thinking aloud to the audience; blank verse gives noble characters a musical rhythm, while prose often marks lower status or madness. Always imagine the scene in the Globe Theatre, not just words on a page.
Form is meaning in poetry
A sonnet's fourteen lines and final couplet create an argument that turns and resolves; free verse rejects those rules to sound like natural speech or chaos. When analysing a poem, ask why the poet chose this form — the shape of the poem is part of what it says.
Key term — narrative voice: The perspective telling the story — first person, third person limited or omniscient. Voice shapes what the reader can know and feel.
Analyse the opening line of Hamlet's most famous soliloquy: To be, or not to be: that is the question.
Identify the form: the line opens a soliloquy, so Hamlet speaks his private thoughts directly to the audience. Unpack the antithesis: to be (to live) is set against not to be (to die) — the whole speech balances two opposites. Notice the rhythm: the measured, near-iambic line gives the thought philosophical weight, as if thinking itself has a heartbeat. Connect to the play's concerns: Hamlet debates action versus inaction, the central dilemma of the tragedy. Conclude: eleven words state the play's driving question.
Answer: The line's antithesis frames existence as a choice between two opposites, its measured rhythm lends the thought philosophical gravity, and as a soliloquy it draws the audience into Hamlet's private dilemma between action and inaction.
- Confusing the narrator with the author The I of a novel is a constructed voice, not the writer. Analyse what the narrator does, not what the author supposedly felt.
- Bolting on context Context must illuminate the analysis: link the historical detail to a specific quotation or effect, not a separate paragraph of history.
Practice
A speech in which a character speaks their thoughts aloud while alone.
It names the technique without explaining its effect — analysis must say how the metaphor shapes meaning.
The audience knows Juliet is only sleeping while Romeo believes she is dead.
Mary Shelley; published in 1818.
Quick check
Which of these best defines "narrative voice"?
Why does poetic form matter?
What is blank verse?
- Studying the Novel: analyse narrative voice, character and structure in prose fiction.
- Shakespeare wrote for the stage: His plays are scripts, not novels — meaning lives in performance.
- soliloquy: A speech in which a character speaks their thoughts aloud, alone on stage.
- Watch out for: confusing the narrator with the author