Chapter Two Point of View

Point of View refers to the standpoint from which a story is told, or the angle from which a fictional work is narrated, or the perspective from which a story is presented to the reader. A story may be told in the first or in the third person point of view, and the teller may be a mere observer or much more than that.

First-Person Point of View is the position from which one of the characters tells the story in his or her own words, that is to say, the narrator is a participant of the story. The first-person point of view is limited, since the reader is told only what this character knows and observes.

Third-Person Point of View means the narrator is often not a character in the story. There are three such points of view and they are:

(1) Third-Person Omniscient (all-knowing). In this position, the author tells the story, and assumes complete knowledge of the characters'actions and thoughts. The author can thus move from one place to another, one time to another, one character to another, and can even speak his or her own views directly to the reader as the story goes along.

(2) Third-Person Limited. In this position, the author still narrates the story but restricts his or her revelation and therefore the reader's knowledge may be limited to the thoughts of all but one characer. This character may be either a main or a peripheral one.

(3) Third-Person Objective. In this position, the author is more restricted than in any other. Though the author is the narrator, he or she refuses to enter the minds of any of the characters. The author sees them as the reader would in real life. This is sometimes called “dramatic”because the reader sees the characters as the audience would the characters in a play.

Related literary terms in this chapter:

Atmosphere is the prevailing mood or feeling of a literary work created or developed, at least in part of the action, through the descriptions of setting, tone, and figurative language.

Figurative language refers to language that causes the reader to make associations that are not always automatically made; it also refers to language that is not intended to be interpreted in a literal sense. By appealing to the imagination, figurative language provides new ways of looking at the world. Figurative language consists of such figures of speech as hyperbole, metaphor, metonymy, oxymoron, personification, simile, and synecdoche.

Innocent narrator (naive narrator) does not comprehend all the complexes and complications of the outer world or fails to understand all or some of the implications of the story.

Unreliable narrator is one whose point of view is deceptive, self-deceptive, deluded, or deranged.