The relations between narration proper and the points of view of the characters being narrated are every bit as complex as the relations between story time and ‘plot’ time. In any narrative form, there is a spectrum of what we can call ‘distances’ between a narrator's ‘voice’ and the mental and sensory states of his or her characters: from alpine and godlike superiority, through gradations of nearer proximity and outright identity to the point where the characters know more than the narrator. This spectrum of relations clearly hinges on a question of apparent ‘knowledge’, although we also know that, in some ultimate sense, the film ‘knows itself’ throughout; it produces various narrators to tantalise us with their different degrees of knowledge.

Consider for a moment the intricate patterns of knowing and unknowing in Brian Singer's Usual Suspects (1995). One principal narrator, ‘Verbal’ Kint, spins a dizzying yarn to one principal narratee, Dave Kujan. Internal to Kint's story, various other narrators tell their stories (Keaton, Kobayashi and so on). Meanwhile, external to it, Kujan interrupts with his own versions of some events, while a survivor of a mysterious waterfront atrocity is telling, in Turkish, the story of seeing Keyser Söze. By interlacing these distinct voices, Singer achieves a formidable density of narrative texture and moreover works towards his astonishing final revelation: that Kint is himself Keyser Söze, and that almost everything he has been telling Kujan (and us) is a welter of lies, fiction and misrepresentation.