In my D/s Porn-o-matic, I discuss narrative distance. The first paragraph below duplicates that discussion. What follows afterwards is inspired by Dorrit Cohn's Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton University Press, 1978/1983). I found this book after writing the porn-o-matic. I've used some of Cohn's terminology but have also done my own thinking. Anything in quotes is Cohn's.

Distance. How intimate are we allowed to be with the psychological experiences of the characters? Does the narrator let us know the feelings of those he or she may be privy to, or do we only get to know the characters from their actions and words? How often are we allowed in, and under what circumstances? How are these experiences represented in language? Does the language seem a close testimony to what would be occurring at that moment or is it more likely a report of secondary processes within the psyche of the character, such as the way he or she might describe the memory of the experience some time after the event?

Narrative commentary. This occurs when the narrator examines and discusses the reported psychological experiences or physical acts of a character in some broader context such as the character's goals or the vagaries of human nature. Unless the narrator is also a character within the world of the novel, the commentary seems imposed from the outside, an intrusion of the author. However, it is possible to view the narrator as simply another character created by the author for the novel. Narrative commentary in this case is as much within the invented boundaries of the novel as everything else in the book.

Language and psychology. What role does language play in the human mind? How pervasive is it? In what sense can emotion or sensation, memory or desire be rendered in language, or is language in reality their natural habitat? What role, therefore, does language play in thought? How accurate can a narrator get to capturing the psychology of a character? (How accurate can any of us get to capturing in language our own psychology or that of others?) The modes of narration discussed below each venture into the mind of their character. The first three modes are from the viewpoint of a third-person narrator, a narrator who is not the character under narration; the last mode is from the viewpoint of a first-person narrator and is therefore the mode of self-narration.

Psycho-narration. ["The narrator's discourse about a character's consciousness."] Thoughts, emotions, perceptions, sensations, desires and feelings, conscious or unconscious, are described indirectly by the narrator with no aim to translate, mimic or represent them faithfully in language. The language used within the description functions as a summary of some moment within the mental life of the character and does not presume to capture the fundamental structure, nature or complexity of that moment. Uses the idiom of the narrator. For example <He wondered if he was late.> (Cohn's example.)

Quoted (interior) monologue. ["A character's mental discourse."] The narrative aim is to translate, mimic or represent the psychological experiences faithfully in language. Grammatical markers include a shift to first-person, present tense, and, in extreme forms, to semantically or syntactically incomplete sentence fragments. Language in quoted interior monologue can range from grammatically well-formed sentences purporting to represent actual psychological processes and conditions, to what might be called abbreviated speech, to an almost nonsensical string of disconnected nouns, verbs, modifiers and other assorted bits of language. In its radical form this is the so-called stream-of-consciousness technique. Cohn's term quoted monologue does not imply the use of quotation marks, but only that the language used derives wholly from the character's psychology, not from the idiom of the narrator. The conceit of this style of narrative is that through language we can capture, if not the full complexity of human psychology, at least a wide variety of the thoughts that occur within our minds. Uses the idiom of the character. Examples include <"Am I late?" he wondered.> or <Am I late?> without the quote marks and attribution, or even simply <Late?>

Narrated (interior) monologue. ["A character's mental discourse in the guise of the narrator's discourse."] The thoughts, emotions, perceptions, sensations, desires and feelings of the character are expressed through the narrator in a kind of identification with the psychology of the character, while retaining the third-person perspective and the same grammatical tense as the rest of the narration. "Imitating the language a character uses when he talks to himself, it casts that language into the grammar a narrator uses in talking about him, thus superimposing two voices that are kept distinct in the other two forms." (p.105) Uses the idiom of the character filtered through the narrator. For example <Was he late?>

Summary of the three modes. Narrated monologue and psycho-narration do not aim to be faithful linguistic representations of psychological processes or conditions; however, like quoted monologue, narrated monologue somehow gives the impression of being closer to what could naively be called the mental grammar of the character than does psycho-narration which merely offers a narrative summary. Yet in contrast to quoted monologue, narrative monologue seems modest in its goals and avoids the dubious pretense, implied by quoted monologue in its extreme forms, of being a faithful copy of (a central portion of) mental life. Finally, only psycho-narration avoids all conjecture on the relationship between language and mentality, or at least it does not presume a mental grammar representable in natural language; yet at the same time, with psycho-narration an author can easily give the impression of plumbing the depths of a character's motivation, intent, and all other manner of psychological esoterica, because in psycho-narration the narrator can claim a linguistically representable understanding of the human mind that may in fact be as fictitious as the character himself, and as philosophically naïve as the purported mental grammar depicted to various degrees of ostensible realism in the other two modes of narration.

Introspection and retrospection. In introspection, the psychological experiences are occurring at the time of their description or report. In retrospection, they occurred earlier and hence are known only through memory. Retrospective description is therefore primarily the description of a memory, not of the experience itself. (It is the introspection of the experience of a memory, rather than the experience the memory is about.) This becomes especially significant in first-person narrative, where the narrator is reporting retrospectively on his own psychological experiences.

Physical and psychological events. Physical events are experienced by the psyche and tagged as originating in the physical realm, but the experience itself is in essence a psychological event. Although this distinction is obscured in our immediate present, it becomes evident in recollecting our past, which exists for us explicitly as nothing but a complex psychological event with various tags indicating the origin, associations, value, and meaning of each particular experience.

Memory of the past. Upon retrospection, our experiences can be reassessed for meaning and value, and misconceptions or misreadings can occur as to the origin or associations of the experience. [1] The apparent memory may have originated in the imagination (past or present) but be recollected as originating in the physical realm or within the understanding, perhaps seeming to be the memory of an even earlier memory or of being a moment of profound discernment or revelation. [2] Other associations of the memory may be faulty. The event may not have happened in the surroundings it seems to have happened. [3] The time period associated with the memory may be wrong. The event may have happened at an earlier or later time. [4] The internal details may be false. What the memory seems to show taking place in the experience may not have occurred in that exact way or even at all, or other particular noteworthy features of the memory may be wrong.

Self-narration. In self-narration, a character narrates his own experiences, typically experiences not as they occur in the immediacy of the introspective present, but as events, mental and physical, in the retrospective past. As mentioned above, memory is a present moment experience or introspection that replays, more or less correctly, moments of previous psychological events. When the story is told in the past-tense, the self-narrator will either feign ignorance of all but the moment under narration and what preceded it, in order to give the impression of living the story as it is told, or he will offer clarification and commentary along the way, his remarks based upon his own knowledge of what that moment came to mean in future moments. But will the narrator's memory of his past be sufficiently comprehensive and reliable to accommodate the meaning and value he as narrator gives it? Will it be exact and true? How could we as readers discover if the narrator's memory were sometimes subtly or severely wrong? In self-narration, the narrator has an agenda at stake. If his narrative is to fulfill that agenda, the narrative, and hence the narrated memories, must not work against it. Because of this, a self-narrator's disclosed recollections may be revised or denied later in the story by himself or others. Self-narration may use the modes of psycho-narration, quoted monologue, and narrated monologue discussed earlier, although in this case the distinction between quoted monologue and narrated monologue is hardly clear.