“The Return of Omniscience,” a hot topic in point-of-view and narratology, mistakes an issue of writer psychology for one of experimentation and technique.

When I just googled the essay in tomorrow’s New York Times Book Review (1), I found it to be a hot literary topic (2).

But they seem to discuss the issue as if writers designed their novels’ narration as a matter of experimentation or technique.

However, from what I’ve read novelists say, they choose a novel’s narrative voice according to what feels right and seems most natural to the story. So it is reflective of how the novelist’s mind worked and of the psychology of the novelist’s creative process.

The text of a novel is a projection of the writer’s mind, and if you want to understand it, you have to understand the writer’s psychology.

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/books/review/the-return-of-omniscience.html

2. https://michaelzyskind363.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/files/2011/06/The-Return1.pdf

Added September 29, 2016: Not only do many writers not choose point-of-view as a matter of technique, they may not even choose it at all, subjectively speaking. It may choose them. Many writers wait receptively for the "voice" for that novel to come to them, not from them. From where? Whose voice? From the voice of one type or another—character, narrator, or muse—alternate personality.