Point of view signifies the way a story gets told—the mode (or modes) established by an author by means of which the reader is presented with the characters, dialogue, actions, setting, and events which constitute the narrative in a work of fiction. The question of point of view has always been a practical concern of the novelist, and there have been scattered observations on the matter in critical writings since the emergence of the modern novel in the 18th century. Henry James' prefaces to his various novels, however — collected as The Art of the Novel (1934)—and Percy Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction (1926), which codified and expanded upon James' comments, made point of view one of the most prominent and persistent concerns in modern treatments of the art of prose fiction. Authors have developed many different ways to present a story, and many single works exhibit a diversity of methods. The simplified classification below, however, is widely recognized and can serve as a preliminary frame of reference for analyzing traditional types of narration and for determining the predominant type in mixed narrative modes. It deals with by far the most widely used modes, third-person and first-person narration. It establishes a broad distinction between these two modes, and then divides third-person narratives into subclasses according to the degree and kind of freedom or limitation which the author assumes in getting the story across to the reader. In a third-person narrative, the narrator is someone outside the story proper who refers to all the characters in the story by name, or as "he," "she," "they." Thus Jane Austen's Emma begins: "Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her." In a first-person narrative, the narrator speaks as "I", and is to a greater or lesser degree a participant in the story, or else is the protagonist of the story. J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, an instance of the latter type, begins: "If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll really want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap..." Third-person point of view has two subclasses. The omniscient point of view is a common term for the many and varied works of fiction written in accord with the convention that the narrator knows everything that needs to be known about the agents, actions, and events, and has privileged access to the characters' thoughts, feelings, and motives; also that the narrator is free to move at will in time and place, to shift from character to character, and to report (or conceal) their speech, doings, and states of consciousness. Using limited point of view, the narrator tells the story in the third person, but stays inside the confines of what is perceived, thought, remembered, and felt by a single character (or at most by very few characters) within the story. Henry James, who refined this narrative mode, described such a selected character as his "focus," or "center of consciousness." In a number of James' later works all the events and actions are represented as they unfold before, and filter to the reader through, the particular perceptions, awareness, and responses of only one character; for example, Strether in The Ambassadors. A short and artfully sustained example of this limited point of view in narration is Katherine Mansfield's story "Bliss." Later writers developed this technique into stream-of-consciousness narration, in which we are presented with outer perceptions only as they impinge on the continuous current of thought, memory, feelings, and associations which constitute a particular observer's total awareness. First-person point of view insofar as it is carried out, limits the matter of the narrative to what the first-person narrator knows, experiences, infers, or finds out by talking to other characters. We distinguish between the narrative "I" who is only a fortuitous witness and auditor of the matters he relates (Marlow in Heart of Darkness); or who is a participant, but only a minor or peripheral one, in the story (Ishmael in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, Nick in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby); or who is himself or herself the central character in the story (Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye). Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man manifests a complex narrative mode in which the protagonist is the first-person narrator, whose focus of character is on the perceptions of a third party—white America—to whose eyes the protagonist, because he is black, is "invisible."