Third-person narrative in the context of "Storytelling game"

Commentarii de Bello Gallico (Classical Latin: [kɔm.mɛnˈtaː.ɾi.iː deː ˈbɛl.loː ˈɡal.lɪ.koː]; English: Commentaries on the Gallic War), also Bellum Gallicum (English: Gallic War), is Julius Caesar's first-hand account of the Gallic Wars, written as a third-person narrative. In it, Caesar describes the battles and intrigues that took place in the nine years he spent fighting the Celtic and Germanic peoples in Gaul who opposed Roman conquest.

The "Gaul" to which Caesar refers is ambiguous, as the term had various connotations in Roman writing and discourse during Caesar's time. Generally, Gaul included all of the regions primarily inhabited by Celts, aside from the province of Gallia Narbonensis (modern-day Provence and Languedoc-Roussillon), which had already been conquered in Caesar's time, therefore encompassing the rest of modern France, Belgium, Western Germany, and parts of Switzerland. As the Roman Republic made inroads deeper into Celtic territory and conquered more land, the definition of "Gaul" shifted. Concurrently, "Gaul" was also used in common parlance as a synonym for "uncouth" or "unsophisticated", as Romans saw Celtic peoples as uncivilized compared with themselves.

In linguistics, grammatical person is the grammatical distinction between deictic references to participant(s) in an event; typically, the distinction is between the speaker (first person), the addressee (second person), and others (third person). A language's set of pronouns is typically defined by grammatical person. First person includes the speaker (English: I, we), second person is the person or people spoken to (English: your or you), and third person includes all that are not listed above (English: he, she, it, they). It also frequently affects verbs, and sometimes nouns or possessive relationships.

In literature, film, and other such arts, an unreliable narrator is a narrator who cannot be trusted, one whose credibility is compromised. They can be found in a wide range from children to mature characters. While unreliable narrators are almost by definition first-person narrators, arguments have been made for the existence of unreliable second- and third-person narrators, especially within the context of film and television, but sometimes also in literature.

The term "unreliable narrator" was coined by Wayne C. Booth in his 1961 book The Rhetoric of Fiction. James Phelan expands on Booth's concept by offering the term "bonding unreliability" to describe situations in which the unreliable narration ultimately serves to approach the narrator to the work's envisioned audience, creating a bonding communication between the implied author and this "authorial audience".

Free indirect speech is the literary technique of writing a character's first-person thoughts in the voice of the third-person narrator. It is a style using aspects of third-person narration conjoined with the essence of first-person direct speech. The technique is also referred to as free indirect discourse, free indirect style, or, in French, discours indirect libre.

Free indirect speech has been described as a "technique of presenting a character's voice partly mediated by the voice of the author", with their voices effectively merged. Or, reversing the emphasis: "... the character speaks through the voice of the narrator", with their voices effectively merged. It has also been described as "the illusion by which third-person narrative comes to express ... the intimate subjectivity of fictional characters." The distinguisher term "free" in the phrase indicates the technique whereby the author—instead of being fixed with the narrator or with just one character—may "roam from viewpoint to viewpoint" among several different characters.Free indirect discourse differs from indirect discourse in not announcing what it is doing. Indirect discourse: "He feared that he would be late for the party." Free indirect discourse: "He rummaged through his closet, desperately looking for something suitable to wear. He would be late for the party."