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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/39766
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/39766
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

An omniscient narrator can tell the whole story: sometimes the narrator's focus is on the MC, sometimes it's elsewhere.

However, if the narrator only rarely strays away from sitting on the MC's shoulder, as it where, the effect could be a bit confusing. When it's done a lot throughout the course of the novel, readers expect it. If you're only going to do this once or twice, you might want to consider the alternatives.

An alternative solution (not necessarily a better one, but one you can consider before discarding) is **having another character tell your MC about the scene _post factum_** , rather than the narrator telling it directly to the reader. Roger Zelazny makes use of this in _The Amber Chronicles_ (narrated in first person throughout), and Tolkien has part of the Paths of the Dead episode, where none of the hobbits are present, recounted to the hobbits later. (This also works best with the order things are told, in this particular case - an event can be a surprise, to the readers and to the hobbits, whose POV the story mostly follows. Then comes the explanation of how it happened.)

Original score: 0