POINT of VIEW

POINT of VIEWFrom whose

perspective...?

1st Person POV I, me, my, we, our…

First person Narrator

• Uses “I”• Story is told from a

main character’s POV


Benefits: • Readers see events from the

perspective of an important character

• Readers often understand the main character better


Detriments: • The narrator may be unreliable

—insane, naïve, deceptive, narrow minded etc...

• Readers see only one perspective

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them.”

--J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)


• True--nervous--very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses--not destroyed--not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily--how calmly I can tell you the whole story.

--Edgar Allan Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1850)


3rd Person POV

Omniscient Limited

Omniscient Objective

Omniscient = all knowing…the narrator can see into the minds of all characters

3rd Person POV: Omniscient

Omniscient:

• godlike narrator; he/she can enter character's minds and know everything that is going on, past, present, and future.

• May be a narrator outside the text


•Advantage: very natural technique; author is, after all, omniscient regarding his work.


• Disadvantage: not lifelike; narrator knows and tells all; is truly a convention of literature


A poor man had twelve children and worked night and day just to get enough bread for them to eat. Now when the thirteenth came into the world, he did not know what to do and in his misery ran out onto the great highway to ask the first person he met to be godfather. The first to come along was God, and he already knew what it was that weighed on the man’s mind and said, “Poor man, I pity you. I will hold your child at the font and I will look after it and make it happy upon earth.”

• --Jakob & Wilhelm Grimm, “Godfather Death” (1812)


• “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its nosiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

• --Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)


Narrator can see into ONE character’s mind.

3rd Person POV: Limited Omniscient

• All characters have thought privacy except ONE.


• Gives the impression that we are very close to the mind of that ONE character, though viewing it from a distance.


• Sometimes this narrator can be too focused or may impose his/her own opinions with no grounds.


• The girl he loved was shy and quick and the smallest in the class, and usually she said nothing, but one day she opened her mouth and roared, and when the teacher--it was French class--asked her what she was doing, she said, in French, I am a lion, and he wanted to smell her breath and put his hand against the rumblings in her throat.

--Elizabeth Graver, “The Boy Who Fell Forty Feet” (1993)


• Although she had been around them her whole life, it was when she reached thirty-five that holding babies seemed to make her nervous--just at the beginning, a twinge of stage fright swinging up from the gut. “Andrienne, would you like to hold the baby? Would you mind?” Always these words from a woman her age looking kind and beseeching--a former friend, she was losing her friends to babble and beseech--and Andrienne would force herself to breathe deep. Holding a baby was no longer natural--she was no longer natural--but a test of womanliness and earthly skills.

• --Lorrie Moore, “Terrific Mother” (1992)


POINT of VIEWRemember, Point of View =

Who is telling the story and how much they contribute.

The end.

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POINT of VIEW