I wish I could become omniscient before I return; but that would be very troublesome.

Whether owing to the almost omniscient look-outs at the mast-heads of the whaleships, now penetrating even through Behring's straits, and into the remotest secret drawers and lockers of the world; and the thousand harpoons and lances darted along all continental coasts; the moot point is, whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc; whether he must not at last be exterminated from the waters, and the last whale, like the last man, smoke his last pipe, and then himself evaporate in the final puff.

see the omniscient gods oblivious of suffering man; and man, though idiotic, and knowing not what he does, yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude.

Magid seeks – in her own words – "the potential softness and intimacy of their technologies, the fallacy of their omniscient point of view, the ways in which they hold memory (yet often cease to remember), their engrained position in society (the cause of their invisibility), their authority, their apparent intangibility and, with all of this, their potential reversibility."

The novel is told from the perspective of all of the main characters, and the omniscient narrator occasionally addresses the reader directly.

The Man and Woman, who begin the play as omniscient narrators, soon assume the roles of the mother and father during the journey.

His 1979 book "Subculture" has been criticized for offering a semiotic reading of punk and adopting an omniscient position in relation to it.

Believers are encouraged to believe in miracles, and to idealize all their weaknesses by imagining an omnipotent, omniscient, immortal God who represents the antithesis of all human flaws and shortcomings.

The narrator is considered "participant" as an actual character in the story, and "nonparticipant" if only an implied character, or a sort of omniscient or semi-omniscient being who does not take part in the story but only relates it to the audience.

First-person narrations may be told like third-person (or omniscient) ones, in the guise of a person experiencing the events in the story without being aware of conveying that experience to an audience; alternatively, the narrator may be conscious of telling the story to a given audience, perhaps at a given place and time, for a given reason.

A rare form of first person is the first person omniscient, in which the narrator is a character in the story, but also knows the thoughts and feelings of all the other characters.

It can seem like third person omniscient at times.

The second axis is the omniscient/limited axis, a distinction that refers to the knowledge available to the narrator.

An omniscient narrator has knowledge of all times, people, places, and events, including all characters' thoughts; a limited narrator, in contrast, may know absolutely everything about a single character and every piece of knowledge in that character's mind, but the narrator's knowledge is "limited" to that character—that is, the narrator cannot describe things unknown to the focal character.

In this case, an author will move back and forth between a more omniscient third-person narrator to a more personal first-person narrator.

The Harry Potter series is told in third person limited for much of the seven novels, but deviates to omniscient in that it switches the limited view to other characters from time to time, rather than only the protagonist. However, like the A Song of Ice and Fire series and the books by Erin Hunter, a switch of viewpoint is done only at chapter boundaries, and in The Heroes of Olympus series the point of view will change between characters at intervals.

Omniscient point of view is also referred to as alternating point of view, because the story sometimes alternates between characters.

Certain third-person omniscient modes are also classifiable as "third person, subjective" modes that switch between the thoughts, feelings, etc. of all the characters.

This style, in both its limited and omniscient variants, became the most popular narrative perspective during the 20th century.

Historically, the third-person omniscient perspective has been the most commonly used; it is seen in countless classic novels, including works by Jane Austen, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot.

The third-person omniscient narrator is the least capable of being unreliable—although the omniscient narrator can have its own personality, offering judgments and opinions on the behavior of the characters.

Some writers and literary critics make the distinction between the third-person omniscient and the universal omniscient, the difference being that in the universal omniscient, the narrator reveals information that the characters do not have. Usually, the universal omniscient reinforces the idea of the narrator being unconnected to the events of the story.

"Third person omniscient" specifies a viewpoint in which readers are provided with information not available to characters within the story; without this qualifier, readers may or may not have such information.