The third-person limited (often called 'third person intimate' by those educated in non-American/British-based systems) is a narrative mode in which the reader experiences the story through the senses and thoughts of one, or more, participating characters. This is almost always the main character—e.g., Gabriel in James Joyce's "The Dead", the titular character in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown", the elderly fisherman in Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, or Harry Potter in J. K. Rowling's series. In third-person limited, the narration is limited in the same way a first-person narrative might be—i.e., the narrator cannot tell the reader things that the focal character does not know—but the text is written in the third person.
The third-person limited mode grew dramatically in popularity during the twentieth century, such that it can be associated with the twentieth century much as the third-person omniscient is associated with the nineteenth century.
