Omniscient narrator

An omniscient narrator is one who can report any character's thoughts and any part of the story world, rather than being confined to a single character's perception.

Omniscience is not the absence of point of view, it is a point of view of its own — a narrator with a personality, a vocabulary and opinions, and one who should be built as deliberately as any character in the book. Most modern fiction runs on close third person instead, which is why omniscience now reads as a choice and gets judged as one.

It is effective, and it is demanding. The things that go wrong are specific: rough transitions between a character's free indirect discourse and the narrator's own voice; inconsistent rules for moving between characters, so the reader cannot tell when a switch is permitted; losing the physical scene while moving between interior thought and narration; and giving several characters a viewpoint without giving them distinct voices, which produces one narrator in costumes rather than a chorus.

The fifth is the quiet one: over-explanation. An omniscient narrator can show the whole board, and showing it drains the drama — the reader is left with nothing to wonder about. Ambiguity and suspense are not failures of clarity, and the trust to leave some of each is what separates a wide narrator from head-hopping.