Point of View
"Point of view" in literature refers to the perspective from which a story is told. It encompasses the narrator's position in relation to the events and characters, and can be first person (using "I" or "we"), second person (using "you"), or third person (using "he," "she," or "they"). The choice of point of view influences the reader's understanding and emotional connection to the narrative.
7 Key excerpts on "Point of View"
eBook - ePubA Writer's Craft
Multi-Genre Creative Writing
- Kendall Dunkelberg(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
...If I tell a story from one character’s perspective, then there may be some information that I cannot reveal, since that character wouldn’t know about it. You might also include some of your character’s bias. The details that character would consciously or subconsciously avoid might give the reader some insight into the character’s motivations. Point of View When you discuss a piece of writing in terms of who is speaking and how the story is told, the technical term for these choices is Point of View. Typically, we think of Point of View primarily for fiction, where it identifies the type of narrator an author uses to relate a story. However, the idea of Point of View can be useful to consider in poetry, where we usually talk about a speaker of the poem, or even in an essay. In drama the range of points of view is generally more limited, since there typically isn’t a narrator, but there are actors that portray the characters. And yet, some of the issues we will discuss with fiction might still apply: how much information about the thoughts of the characters are we given, which character or characters do we follow, etc.? To begin, then, let us look at the more familiar range of points of view in fiction, where we typically identify three main types: first person, second person, and third person. If you’re good at grammar, or if you’ve studied a foreign language, then you probably know that the first person pronoun is “I.” So a first person narrator is one who refers to him or herself using “I.” Of course, in reality, it may be an author who takes on a character’s voice and tells the story in that persona, using “I” to refer to the character, not the author. Even in autobiography, we might say that the first person narrator isn’t exactly the author because every writer takes on a persona when she sits down to write, even if that persona is very close to her true self...
- Rust Hills(Author)
- 2000(Publication Date)
- Mariner Books(Publisher)
...Point-of-View Methods The choice of the Point of View to be used in a story may be pre-made, more or less unconsciously, by the author, as being basic to his whole conception of it. Otherwise, though, choices about Point of View will undoubtedly be the most important decisions about technique that he has to make. Point of View, of course, is in general terms how the story is told, the way in which it is narrated. Defining the term is complicated by the fact that it’s sometimes used to apply to the whole of the way in which the story is presented to the reader by the author—the rhetoric and the logic of it, so to speak—and sometimes it applies to so small a reference as the name of the character who is the narrator in a particular story. Clearly there are many different kinds of ways that a story can be told, and anthologists and critics are always trying to sort these ways out into their different kinds, often inventing new names for techniques that overlap one another and confuse an already mind-boggling business. The question of Point of View can take you right into the basic metaphysics of literature: every story has an author and a reader, and how the story gets from one to another is at the heart of the matter. Point of View may represent the whole aspect of form in fiction, some say; or it may even be the whole basis of the content, as presented; or it may represent the fusion of the two that, according to literary aesthetics, achieves the creation of literary art itself. Some choose to discuss Point of View in terms of “authority,” asking how the story is made convincing to the reader. Some emphasize “focus of narration,” asking how the elements of the story are unified artistically by the telling. Some systems of categorizing Point of View concentrate on the rhetoric, some on the reality...
eBook - ePubHow to Read Like a Writer
10 Lessons to Elevate Your Reading and Writing Practice
- Erin M. Pushman(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
...Third-person narrators/speakers name characters and explain what happens to them using the characters’ names or any of the third-person pronouns (she/he/it/they, etcetera). Within third-person narration, there are three more-specific points of view. Limited third happens when a narrator/speaker closely follows one character and knows that character’s thoughts and feelings. While “limited third” is the term often used to discuss literature, many writers use the term “close third” instead because the narration gives a close perspective on one character. An omniscient narrator knows everything about everyone in the piece and can speak to the thoughts and feelings of any of the characters—even minor ones. An objective narrator or speaker is pretty much what it sounds like: a narrator/speaker who reports what is happening in an objective manner without commenting on the thoughts or feelings of any of the characters. In general, writers use this POV less often than the other third-person points of view. In terms of studying narrators or speakers, reading the way writers read means more than recognizing whether the voice telling the story or poem is narrating from first, second, or third person. Reading writers consider how different lenses work and why a particular lens is used. First Person First-person narrators or speakers are also characters. Often, they are main characters. Look again at Gary, the first-person narrator of “Jerry’s Crab Shack: One Star.” (We know his name is Gary from the beginning of his Yelp review, but he calls himself, “I.”) Gary is a main character in this story. His character development and the explanation of what happens to him and his internal and external conflicts, all come to us through his lens and in his voice. Reading for POV in this hybrid short story, it is important to notice that the I narrator is crucial to the way the story works. Yelp reviews are first-person...
eBook - ePub- Linda Anderson, Derek Neale(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Here is a summary of what this entails in relation to the viewpoints explored in this chapter and the preceding one: With a first-person narrator, the voice will be that character’s distinctive language and phraseology, his or her way of thinking and writing. With second-person narration, the ‘you’ includes the reader as a player in the unfolding story or refers to the main character’s divided self. With third-person limited omniscience, there will be a combination of the main character’s personal voice and the narrator’s reporting of that in free indirect style. With multiple viewpoints in the third person, there will be a subtle shift of tone each time you enter a different character’s Point of View. With third-person objective, the voice will be in a dispassionate tone, offering no interpretation of the events witnessed. With full omniscience, the tone will reveal the persona of your storyteller: majestic, barnstorming, forensic, elegiac, witty, unassuming, whatever you decide. It requires practice to ‘get’ these various methods, so do refer back to the examples given...
- Crawford Kilian, Silvia Moreno-Garcia(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Self-Counsel Press(Publisher)
...The trick for the novice author is what actors call “staying in character.” It’s fatally easy to slip into your own character, so the narrator sounds just like you. Another hazard is making the first-person narrator so different from yourself (and from your readers) that it’s hard to figure out what’s going on. This is the case in Iain Banks’s Feersum Endjinn, part of which is narrated by an alien with a tedious fondness for phonetic spelling. 10. Second Person Point of View The second person mode is rare: You knocked on the door. You went inside. Very few writers feel the need for it, and still fewer use it effectively. However, Charles Stross pulled off a brilliant stunt in his 2007 novel Halting State, using multiple second-person points of view. 11. Third Person Point of View Chances are that you’ll find third person the most effective Point of View for telling your story. And within third person you have several useful choices. 11.1 Third person limited If the Point of View is third person limited, persona again depends on the single character through whose eyes readers witness the story. You may go inside the character’s mind and tell us how that character thinks and feels, or you may describe outside events in terms the character would use. Readers like this Point of View because they know whom to invest in or identify with. 11.2 Third person objective In third person objective, readers have no entry to anyone’s thoughts or feelings. The author simply describes, without emotion or editorializing, what the characters say and do. The author’s persona here is almost nonexistent. Readers may be unsure whose fate they should care about, but it can be very powerful precisely because it invites readers to supply the emotion that the persona does not...
eBook - ePubReading and Writing a Screenplay
Fiction, Documentary and New Media
- Isabelle Raynauld(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...In this case, the configuration would be: R/S = Mc < Sc (= bomber) The reader/spectator KNOWS AS MUCH as the main character, who KNOWS LESS than the secondary characters, who KNOWS MORE than the main character (e.g. in The Man Who Knew Too Much). In screenwriting terms, the Point of View is much more than a simple “account of the facts”. It is a filter, a perspective, a field restriction, an angle, an opinion, a restrictive view or, as Michel Chion (1994) eloquently said about sound, it is a point of listening (audition), of vision (see Chapter 9). The Point of View is the dramatic and narrative architecture of the plot content. Who, between the spectator and the main character, will know what and at what time, is the cornerstone of devising a narrative Point of View, be it from a literary, cinematic or journalistic standpoint. In the screenplay, and later on, in the film, the Point of View can be structured and unfurl in many ways and on many levels, including (1) in the plot – the “what”, “what am I being told?”; (2) in the narrative – the “how”, “in which order am I discovering the content of the film?”; (3) in the visual track – “what am I being shown in the choice of framing, camera shots, angles and movements?”; (4) in the sound track – “what am I deducing from what I can or cannot hear: voices, noises, words, music?”; (5) in the mise en scène within a given scene – “what I understand, infer, interpret from the actors’ performance, from what is left unsaid, from looks, etc.” Finally, the Point of View concerns both the viewers and the film’s main and secondary characters within the story, who know different things and hold different pieces of the puzzle, depending on their access to key information. What do the situation, the point of listening and vision allow? Figure 6.4 is from a crime film, Witness (directed by Peter Weir, 1985, original idea and screenplay by William Kelley, Pamela Wallace and Earl Wallace)...
eBook - ePub- Kristian Smidt(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...IV Point of View IN ELIOT’S POETRY S INCE most of Eliot’s poems are in the first person, the problem of poetic belief is bound up with the problem of Point of View, which we will now briefly consider before going on to the relation between the more purely technical aspects of the poems and their ‘contents’. As I shall use the term here, ‘Point of View’ has to do with the identity of the ‘I’, or the supposed speaker of the poem, and of the ‘you’, or the person who is addressed by the speaker. The choice of the grammatical first and second persons rather than the third is itself a choice of Point of View. But the use of the first person does not necessarily mean that the poet is speaking in his own voice—he may have wanted to write a monologue for an imaginary character. The Point of View can only in part be determined by the use of pronouns. And sometimes there are no pronouns to indicate the speaker and the person or persons spoken to at all. The Point of View must be inferred, from verb forms or by other means. Imperatives like ‘Look!’ and ‘Listen!’ presuppose someone speaking to somebody else. And even the progressive form of the verb suggests an observer describing a present experience. Thus in Eliot’s lines In this decayed hole among the mountains In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing there are both the demonstrative pronoun ‘this’ and the progressive form ‘is singing’ to argue an observer present at the scene described. There are usually enough of these signs in a poem to give a sufficient indication of the Point of View. And generally there is no need for the poet to preface his poem with an explanation of the degree of subjectivity or objectivity to be found in it. If no other indication is given the ‘I’ is naturally assumed to be that of the poet himself and the ‘you’ to refer to the reader...
