Strange, isn't it, the whole concept of a narrative voice in fiction? A mode of storytelling that's strictly speaking one of the most attuned to the human mind, the basis of all thought-processes: how often do we find ourselves internally going over what we've done over the past few minutes, hours, days, months, years...? And yet it's also one of the hardest things to convey onscreen. What a character can internalize with pages and pages of authorial control is immensely difficult to portray onscreen. Often the best way to go about adaptating this is the more straightforward route of eschewing the narrative voice and leaving it to the visual to convey the scene; for example, 'I recall it being a dusky dawn evening and mama sitting on the porch knitting', instead of having narration over it, just simply filmed and told without a disembodied voice providing commentary. This sort of 'external' narration is much easier to adapt than the 'internal' narration some novels hinge almost entirely upon; Graham Greene's 'The End of the Affair' being a notable example. I've always been a firm believer in the perfect medium for this masterpiece to be adapted would be a radio play, and indeed I feel the medium of film, through which it has twice been adapted, does kind of hurt the source material a bit in that every moment that strays from Maurice Bendrix's narrative voice, which writes 'against the bias because it is my professional pride to prefer the near-truth, even to the expression of my near-hate', kind of reduces the impact of the book's conflict between feigned objectivity and Bendrix's passions, as well as eschewing a whole lot of the whole metanarrative flair to Greene's story. The plot of 'The End of the Affair' itself is strong enough to make a good enough skeleton for your typical melodramatic romance, but the near-impossibility of conveying Bendrix's narrative voice alongside it means that a lot of the novel's original power is lost.
It doesn't always have to be like that. 'To Kill a Mockingbird', despite the excision of several subplots and characters from the original source material, is in my view one of the greatest film adaptations of a novel ever, in large part due to how it retains that narrative voice even in very small snippets of voiceover, and maintaining this tone for the rest of the film. For example, in the scene where she comes face to face with Boo the narrative voice in the novel, tinged with love and excitement, is conveyed almost silently and perfectly by Mary Badham and Robert Duvall. In 'The Shawshank Redemption' it seems almost cheating to have Morgan Freeman as Red as he damn well near steals the film away from everyone through his narration. Each and every beat of the film is matched perfectly with his voiceover and it is marvellous; and on the opposite end of the spectrum, the beauty of Kazuo Ishiguro's butler Steven's narration in 'The Remains of the Day' is retained by Anthony Hopkins' beautifully nuanced performance which, despite the lack of a narrative voice to guide him along, successfully manages to convey the exact tone of his narrative voice in the novel through his physical performance.
It's tricky to convey the sense of narration on the silver screen largely because it seems almost clumsy to have to rely upon the auditory, when the visual is all yours for the taking. But before people begin to chastitise the narrative voiceover as an inherently flawed storytelling technique, think about how it can add to a film, and not just in a Morgan Freeman, eloquent sort of way. Think about how it can add layers of ambiguity if fitted in accordance with the off-kilter nature of the rest of the film. 'Fight Club' comes to mind as a film which, without Edward Norton's terrific voiceover, would certainly lose a lot of its pop cultural power. In the basest sense it can help you keep track of where the story's headed; it can also nod towards the story itself in a cheeky sort of way, acknowledging its fictionality ('The Princess Bride') in a fun way, or adding layers of poignancy ('Titanic'). It's true that some films are better off without it than others (Stanley Kubrick's 'The Killing' comes to mind), but largely I think if done in the right way, the voiceover narrative voice onscreen can provide boundless utility for the filmmaker to go beyond just exposition and explanation, and really add layers to the story at hand simply by picking the right sort of voice to go along with it.
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