Semansky teaches literature and composition online. His essays, stories, and poems appear regularly in magazines and journals. In this essay, Semansky examines Burgess's narrative technique.

When we tell stories or listen to them, there is always a teller, someone describing the situation and relating the action, often commenting on it. When the person telling the story is also involved in the story, the teller is called a first-person narrator. When novelists use such narrators, they must choose between a first-person central narrator and a first-person peripheral narrator. Both use the firstperson pronoun "I," but the latter involves a narrator who, although telling the story from his or her point of view, is a minor player in the events described, often an observer of things happening to others. A first-person central narrator, on the other hand, also involves a narrator who tells the story from his or her...