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The third-person omniscient is a narrative mode in which the both the reader and author observe the external situation through the senses and thoughts of every character equally and without bias, although that character in focus may shift throughout the course of the story.

Although first-person fictional narratives are popular as well, the third-person is often asserted to be the preferred voice in fiction^{citation needed}.

While an omniscient point of view can change viewpoint characters instantly, the limited omniscient point of view narrative limits narration to what can be known, seen, thought, or judged from a single character's perspective. Thus, the narration is limited in the same way a first-person narrative might be, but the text is written from the third-person perspective.

Henry James, who used the third-person limited omniscient (or third-person limited subjective) narrative in his novel The Ambassadors and coined the phrase "effaced narration" to describe it, believed this could create high art, and contemporary literary writers seem to agree. The effaced narrator dominates contemporary literary art.^{citation needed} James pointed out that in effaced narration, the art consisted of varying the reader's psychological distance from the action, bringing the reader in close for high drama, and further out for ordinary events.

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