I've heard advice that in an alternating third person limited POV, the narration alone should be enough to seat the reader within the POV. I like this concept.
What are some concrete ways in which the narrator can have a unified style throughout a novel, but also be shaded between two points of view for alternating chapters?
For example, one of my POV characters may be more focused on the 'world' and the other may be more focused on people. This could impact the narrator. Yes? No?
Would the personality of the character shade the narrator? Imagine a character is high strung, and another is almost catatonic. Would the narration reflect this?
Could a narrator be more terse in one POV and more expansive in another?
I aim for a unified style and/or voice throughout, but also like the idea that the POV shades narration and am curious how these ideas are balanced.
Edit: I'm using third person limited, and have alternating viewpoints between two protagonists. The genre is SF-F. I plan to query soon.
Up until this point I used essentially the same 'narrator' for both viewpoints, so, for example, if they saw a mountain, it would be described in similar terms. The exception to this is that any similes I added would be anchored in the character's life experience. A desk clerk, for example, would have a narrator in her chapters that said the mountain was pointed like a pencil tip. A lumberjack would have a narrator that said it was pointed like the tooth of a saw. But other than similes, it didn't occur to me to distinguish the narrator between viewpoints.
Color is important to one of my characters. I'm considering removing every mention of color from the alternate character/chapters. This would be a subtle change, I think, to the reader, but the sort of thing I am wondering about.
I'm curious how far this sort of tweaking should go before it would become jarring. But imagine the extreme - Maybe a terse, angry narrator with a dialect in odd chapters and a calm, loving, well educated narrator in even chapters is fine ... or not ...???