We love to read, and when we're immersed in literature, the characters come to life for us! We know them--all their most secret and intimate details. Sometimes, we become too involved in a character's life (and situation). We know what they want, who they are, and sometimes, we may even imagine ourselves into the world of the novel. What do you do if you're in love with a fictional character?

What do you know about a character depends on the narrator: he/she decides what let you discover of him or her, so he selects the informations he gives to the reader. 

Sometimes, when a reader love a certain story, he/she find him/her self in it, as part of it, as acting in a drama. “The characters come to life for us” said the quotation. It is true, because when we read a story, the characters are acting for us, they come to life for the reader only. 

The narrator, in particular the Modernist one, sharpens this emotion of the reader, reveling the “most secret and intimate details” of the protagonist of the novel. He/she stays in the mind of them, he knows what the think, what they are and what they are going to do. But the technique used is quite different from the third person omniscient narrator of the literally tradition: he knows everything. The Modernist narrator is more complex: first of all it try to stay in the shadow, you can say it is eclipsed but he uses the shift of point of view to let the reader know all it is important from the point of view of the different characters. The extract of Mrs Dalloway we have studied could be an example. The reader comes across Mss Kilman thanks to the flows of thoughts of Clarissa, thanks to the stream of consciousness, as this narrative technique is called. The reader know her from the protagonist’s point of view and, as a consequence, from another character’s point of view the protagonist thinks about.

All the sentences that coincides with the fast feelings of the character, are all linked and raised by objects, actions,… and sometimes they are not finished, hanged over. So the reader could go on, complete them with his/her subjectivity become involved in the story.