Point of View - A Few Words

When reading fiction, Point of View is probably one of the first things that is (should bee) noted, it is often the first things encountered and can be established as early as the first sentence in some cases. It has its effects upon many aspects of the story, including how information is conveyed to the reader, how reliable a narrator is, establishment of the "point-of-view-character, or the character through which the story is filtered, and even how we are asked to know and relate to the characters and the ideas given to us during the course of a given story.

Simply put, POV refers to the way a story is told, and its deft handling is paramount to the successful story. If the chosen POV is not right for the complete dramatic ordering of the subject matter, the story will not reveal all its possibilities to the author, and the story will be incomplete. Ultimately POV (which is the most subtly complex element of fiction)concerns the relationship between writer, characters, and reader.

Broken down into its base components/ideas, POV looks like this:

first-person narrator - (identifiable by the pronoun "I") one of the story's characters relates the story's action and events. This character may be the protagonist (the "I" telling "my" story), and would be considered the "central narrator," as that character is central to the story being told (think of Updike's A & P). The character may also be a "peripheral narrator" - a first person narrator who is telling the story about someone else, a narrator who himself/herself does not figure prominently into the story but knows and relates the story's events and action (Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" comes to mind. A first-person narrator lends immediacy and a strong voice to a story, but can also be considered "unreliable" as a narrator. This is because we are getting a one-sided story, and the narrator's propensity toward truth, sanity, etc. could be questioned. The authority of the first-person narrator is limited. It is a biased report that we are receiving, but this "bias," or unreliability, can be used by an author to great effect. Think about the cliche, "There are two sides to every story."

third-person narrator - in which the author is telling the story, or the narrator is a non-participant (identifiable by the pronouns "he," "she," "it," "they"). This POV can be subdivied by the degree of knowledge a narrator/author posseses.

"third-person omniscient" is when the teller knows everything there is to know about all the characters, the setting, background, etc. It is often considered lofty and a bit distant (think of classical epics - Homer, Virgil, etc.). Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilych" is one example. However, the omniscient narrator is used less and less, if one examines a time-line of fiction--modern literature's movement downward from the heroic to the common character, from external action to the psychological action of the mind, has contributed to this lessening of the use of the god-like stance of the omniscient narrator.

"third-person limited" (or sympathetic) is confined to revealing the thoughtd of a few (usually one) character(s). This characters is known as the "point-of-view-character." This method was first developed in fiction by Gustave Flaubert - it alows for a more interior, more subjective view of characters and event. Think of Anton Chekhov's "Gusev" as an example. Henry James came up with another theory about limited omniscience narrating. He referred to certain characters in his stories as the "central intelligence." Stories told this way are not always about a single character, but they do involve a character, placed at the center of the action, through whom the author registers and evaluates everything that happens, including what happens to and within the character. In this type of story (James Joyce's "The Dead" as an example), the character's psyche is the stage for the drama.

"third-person objective" is just what it sounds like - a story in which the narrator remains coimpletely objective, and the only info give to the reader is that which is readily and physically observable by the narrator. In third-person objective, the narrator renders explicit, observable details and does not have access to the internal thoughts of characters or background information about the setting or situation. A character's thoughts, for example, are inferred only by what is expressed openly, in actions or in words. This point of view is also known as third-person dramatic because it is generally the way drama is developed. (Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" is the famous example).

second-person narrator- the second person (identifiable by the pronoun "you") is rarely used in fiction since a forced identification of the reader with the fictional world is difficult to sustain.

Hopefully this will help as you read through the stories for the course. Keep an eye on this blog for further words on the elements that we will be studying i conjunction with these stories. Remember, POV will be something to consider beyond the scope of the two weeks of the syllabus devoted to that element.