Who is the narrator, can she or he read minds, and, more importantly, can we trust her or him?
First Person (Central Narrator)
Okay, so what's the narrative technique in Parable of the Sower? Is the first-person pronoun "I" strewn over all the pages? Yep, check. So what we've got here probably a first-person narrator.
But not so fast. Let's examine the matter a little more closely.
The narrator is the person who is telling us the story. In this case, it's Lauren. She's telling us her story, and she's using the first-person voice to do it with. So yep, that means we've got a first-person narrator.
However, there's another question. Is Lauren a first-person central narrator or a first-person peripheral narrator? A first-person central narrator tells his or her own story, while a first-person peripheral narrator tells someone else's story. In Parable of the Sower, of course, Lauren's definitely telling us her own story, so she's a first-person central narrator.
Why does all this matter? What's the point? Well, probably what's so cool about it is that often, we don't get a look inside the mind of a religious leader. Sure, we can read their (or their disciples') religious writing, but unless we're digging into the works of Gandhi or something like that, we don't really get to see a religious leader self-consciously psychoanalyzing him- or herself.
Parable of the Sower tells us about a sci-fi, Black, female, teenager, who founds her own religion. What's more is that we get to witness all that from her point of view, her telling us this story through her journals. It's a very intimate and personal perspective, so we get to see what it might be like to be someone such as Lauren.
Cool, right?