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How many voices can a narrative contain? An easy answer is that depends on a narrative's length. Longer works, more possible voices. Shorter works, fewer possible voices.
One challenge of narrative voice for many writers is who's the narrator. Written word narratives in many cases may feel as though no narrator reports the action. Many other narratives may feel as if the narrator reports the action though is covert to a degree. Many other narratives may feel as if the narrator is right up front reporting action directly to readers. Any given narrative may vary from one extreme to another along several axes: overt or covert, objective or subjective, mediating or nonmediating, aligned with a central character or in opposition to one or all characters.
No does a narrative per se have only one narrator, hence more than one narrative voice.
For purposes of this discussion, though, let's assume one narrative voice is a "rule," though I prefer the term "guideline." A majority fraction of all literature follows the one narrator rule, convention-based genre of recent times in particular.
That's one voice. Does the narrator report or portray character voices in other voices than the narrator's and the characters fictive speech, thoughts, actions, reactions, perceptions, and emotions verbatim? Or does the narrator spin and slant character speech, thought, action, perception, and emotion? At times then is the reporting solely the narrator's voice? Or is the narrator only a stenographer witnessing directly and only translating character voices verbatim from their fictive settings into written word?
Does a character's voice change as an action unfolds? From uncertain, doubtful, timid, shy, reserved, vulnerable to strong, confident, assured, certain or vice versa? Is that change a different voice?
In simple math, a narrative has one narrator voice, including all its traits and transfornmations, one voice per character whether a speaking role or not. In that sense a character's actions may speak louder than words, though, for written word purposes, translated to written word. When Mary spanks Holden, Holden stubbornly refuses to cry or react at all, Mary gives up in frustration, Holden goes off to commiserate in private, that's each's expression given in a narrator summarizing and explaning voice.
In exponential math, a narrative has as many different voices as changes, traits of the moment, and as varying narrator and characters may express for any given action.
I see struggling writers too easily and often writing in one voice, or at most two that interrupt each other, unsettled voice. This voice is the one and only writing voice the writer has developed. It is the writing voice of the writer, not an implied writer, nor a narrator, nor a character, but the everyday voice of the writer, usually at about the degree of development attained from writing for coursework, high school, college, or work, as the case may be.
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One voice, two voices, three? Let's consider that a narrative has one voice--that of a narrator orating the entirety. This is most apparent when a reader reads--performs--a narrative aloud to an audience. The reader as orator speaks with one voice the parts of all the personas. The reader may use vocal intonations to distinguish characters and narrator's voices, the mannerisms of the voices, their dialects and accents, their personal identities. The reader may not, reading with a flat, lifeless voice.
Written word narratives are entirely verbal expression, owing their origins to spoken word expression. Written word became a method for stenographic recording or spoken word narratives. Vocal expression includes intonation and nonvocal, gestural expression. The Mehrabian communication studies observed that "liking" a speaker who uses verbal, vocal, and nonvocal expression broke down into 7 percent verbal, the words themselves, 38 percent vocal intonation, and 55 percent gestural expression, body language.
Merahbian's results and conclusions have limitations; however, for creative writing where only words--the verbal component--are available to meaningfully express meaning, the need for and challenge of implying or at least directly providing meaning context and texture, the study suggests verbal expression must encompass vocal and gestural expression. This is a narrator's duty.
A narrator's voice then may express or imply intonation and describe gestures. Along an axis of extremes between totally effaced narrator baldly, objectively reporting perceptions and conceptions (covert) to a narrator subjectively commenting on every stimuli aspect observed and meaningful (overt), a narrator's voice holds infinite possibilities. An example of a totally effaced (covert) narrator is Ernest Hemingway's writing. An overt narrator is common in William Faulkner's writing. Both writers were not only contemporaries, they were close and at times contentious acquaintances.
This covert narrator voice is Hemingway's most admired quality. Faulkner's narrative voice, on the other hand, was the principal voice of creative writing preceding his time and on back into the early origins of prose. The overt narrator voice is by degrees omniscient, omnipresent, and early on in literature's history omnipotent. To claim that a totally covert narrator's voice is absolutely not ominiscient is a fallacy. The narrator has omniscient access to any and all actions and thoughts but omnipotently chooses to leave them out of an account; in other words, omnipresent access to the center of an action and its events but detailing only the events, characters, and settings central to the needs of the plot.
More to come anon, mostly examples of differing narrator voices, from highly objective and covert to highly subjective and overt and points in between.
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I've finished a close reread of Seymour Chatman's Story and Discourse. Next on the narrative theory homefront is Wayne Booth's Rhetoric of Fiction, which Chatman cites frequently. For the first half, Chatman discusses story, of course, aspects that are kernels to a narrative: events, characters, and settings, conventions thereof. The second half explores numerous variations of narrative voice and their relevance to narrative discourse.
From aspects of narrator overtness to covertness, stream of consciousness, indirect speech and thought, objective to subjective, detached to invested, commenting to neutral, interpretation to judgement to generalization to self-reflexive, from omniscient to limited to no psychic access, narrative distance, from narrator to ambiguous to character expression, etc., Chatman touches upon voice variables of a near infinite scope but through distinguishing specifics discuses a wealth of voice axes and their distinctive markers and conventions.
For any writer struggling with story elements and features and voice, that is ready to move beyond the intermediate craft phase, into advanced voice phase, that struggles with doubts, that lays out words in strings with little realizatiion of their influences on readers, little appreciation for implication and inference, and irony, Chatman is a trove.
Citing ample examples from classic literature {most of which I've read) and fellow narrative theorists, at times disagreeing with one or another (my disagreeing with Chatman at times too), Chatman enumerates a spectrum of narrative qualities. One of the text's most useful qualities is Chatman follows an analytical method that dissects word for word and line by line the fiction and film passages he cites. He labels the process "reading out." The text doesn't dictate how to analyze (tell), though ample examples demonstrate (show) how. I believe developing that analytical technique will serve any writer who's interested in smoothing out, clarifying, and strengthening writing. Though Chatman does not unequivocally assert, the book is a valuable tool for learning self-editing, developmental editing, developing and strengthening draft writing, rewriting, and revision skills, and coping with doubt and its ancilliary creativity opposition writer's block.
If the text has shortcomings, I'd say it's accessibility is challenging, about at a middling degree compared to, say, Gustav Freytag. The other shortcoming I see is one common to writing rhetoric and narrative theory generally; that is, many of the concepts are expressed through shown demonstrations and not as strongly explanatory as might be desired. Though not a shortcoming per se, also, I feel as if any one concept could be more thoroughly explored. The text is in essence a survey of the two principal areas of narrative theory named by the book's title: story and discourse.
I rarely encounter a narrative theory text that says up front what it's about. Too often a title is too generic and vague or unclear about what it's about. In the former case, Freytag's Technique of the Drama, which is about causation and tension features of dramatic structure; the latter, Donald Maass' Writing the Breakout Novel, which is mostly about methods for developing audience appeals.
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