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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/32087
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/32087
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

## It is not the personality, it is the style

Following on the OP's generalisation, a narrator can be divided in at least two parts:

- the persona
- the narrating style

The **persona** is the entity itself, which is part of the information that is being passed. In a novel it would be one of the characters. This has nothing to do with the way the story is told. In fact, given an underlying truth of the facts to be transmitted, there is one and only one way in which the narrator persona participated to the facts.

The **narrating style** is the voice telling the information. For any piece of information being told, the voice must know it already. There is thus a temporal disconnection between the persona, who participated in the events, and the voice, which is relaying them.

**The persona can hardly be a source of reader's nuisance.** As long as the information yields content that the receiver finds interesting, there is no way in which the personality of the persona could affect this outcome. In fact, the personality of the persona is an integral part of the information, and the information itself could not exist as such without that specific persona.

**The narrating style is the key.** Given the rules, the information can be conveyed in a very large number of ways. For an everyday example, simply pick several newspapers, maybe from different countries, and compare how articles on the same event have been written. In the case the OP described, the narration includes a first person POV, which entails bias, possible lack of omniscience, and a fourth wall breaking potential. Famous examples in literature come to mind: _Ulysses_ by Joyce, which most everyday readers would find tiresome to read, _A Princess of Mars_ by _Burroughs_, which is likely less tiresome, _The burrow_ by Kafka, which is (short, and) gripping with emotions. One could imagine Joyce rewriting A Princess of Mars, using the same style as in Ulysses, and overloading the reader with information about the inner state of mind of the narrator, and resulting again in a literary brick of unsurpassed density, despite the amount of exciting events being described.

[Henry Taylor's](https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/31563/28528) answer provides very good narrative devices on how to keep on track. In my opinion, in blockbuster literature there seems to be a trend towards a more journalistic style, action-based\*, with dry narration, short and witty remarks, and, overall, a purpose to each piece of information being passed. Even jokes, inner states of mind, flashbacks, all serve the purpose to make the reader immerse in the information.

Some random references concerning the style of narration from writers.SE (there are a lot more available, my apologies if I missed most of them):[How to avoid repetitive sentence structure](https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/6642/how-to-avoid-repetitive-sentence-structure?s=9%7C16.1502)[How much repetition is too much?](https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/16009/how-much-repetition-is-too-much-repetition?s=3%7C20.1939)[Tricks to avoid repetition in writing](https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/1449/what-are-the-tricks-to-avoid-repetition-in-writing?s=1%7C21.7375)[How to write repeated actions?](https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/32074/how-to-write-repeated-actions)

<sub>(*): As an example, I was recently re-reading Ivanhoe and suddenly realized how lengthy bucolic landscape descriptions (provided solely as a painted background canvas) have considerably shrunk in equivalent modern sword and cape literature.</sub>

Original score: 2