Katawa Shoujo Forums

So... Is this Rin narrating and she refers to herself in the third person, or do we have a narrator who is somehow just as spacey as Rin is?

Mirage_GSM wrote:So... Is this Rin narrating and she refers to herself in the third person, or do we have a narrator who is somehow just as spacey as Rin is?

I see it as limited 3rd person, like not that the narrator is spacey but that they are describing things as Rin sees and thinks about them.

Not quite. 3rd person limited narration restricts the narrator to knowing the thoughts and feelings of just one character in the story.
It does not make the narrator share any psychological conditions that character might have.

So in 3rd person limited you CAN tell us Rin's thoughts but you have to use indirect speech to do so, e.g.:

Rin Tezuka has become unstuck in thought.

She thinks about the mural. To her it looks white, and red, and the color of the sea, and the color of thought, and the color of that feeling she gets when she wakes up and has no idea where she is and is confused...

Otherwise the readers will have the question I asked above: Who is narrating? Is it Rin? Is it someone with the same condition?

The narration style for this piece was actually inspired by Slaughterhouse-Five, which is also referenced in the first two lines:

Listen:
Rin Tezuka has come unstuck in thought.

Slaughterhouse-Five actually does have a narrator; it technically uses first-person narration the whole way through, but the narrator only mentions himself at a few points in the story. At all other points, the narrator details the thoughts, emotions, and events of the story in much the same way as I have (which resembles third-person omniscient at times).

So really, I'd call it a variant of third-person omniscient with a dash of first-person, perhaps? Also a splash of plain weirdness.