4 Chapter 4: Analyzing Point of View
Chapter 4: Analyzing Point of View
If you were asked to take a picture of some particular thing—anything under the sun, from the Statue of Liberty to the burrito you had for lunch—you would quickly realize that there are many different ways you could go about doing this to arrive at different results. Selections of camera angle, what else you include in your shot frame, lighting, filters, and technical aspects like lens type would each give you a different take on the visually captured object, would allow you so see some details clearly but not others, create a different emotional resonance, and otherwise present a carefully orchestrated “take” on your subject. Fiction works the same way—there is no plot or character that is not filtered, shaped, and slanted through what we call point of view or narrative perspective. You can’t have a story without some voice telling it, just as you can’t have a photograph without some camera capturing it from some physical vantage point. Point of view is this “voice” or sensibility that shapes a story through narrating it.
The vast majority of works of fiction employ either a first-person or a third-person narrator—that is, respectively, a character from within the world of the story is recounting it or a disembodied voice from outside the narrative world is. No matter what form of point of view a story employs (and we’ll go into greater depth detailing these below), narrative point of view is a construct, a formulation of language. There is no pure story existing outside of the structuring that occurs through point of view, and one of the things that defines fiction as a genre of writing is that the narrator is never the voice of the author. In other genres of writing like journalism and the essay the historical personage who penned the work is understood as the figure speaking to the reader through the text, but in the case of fiction the writer is understood to stand wholly removed from the events of the narrative, which are shaped and set forth by the textual construct of the narrator.
The nature of point of view will become clearer as we examine the different possible types of point of view that exist and the particular ways that they structure narratives. Here they are:
First person point of view: A first person narrator is a character in the narrative. They can be involved in the events of the narrative (this is called a participant narrator) or stand outside of them as a detached observer (this is a non-participant narrator). They can be the story’s protagonist, like in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, they can be a minor or supporting character like Nick Carraway in the Great Gatsby, or they can be so minor a character that they go unnamed. In the first book of Francois Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, which reads as if it is being told from the third-person perspective, the reader doesn’t even realize they have been dealing with a first person narrator until the final chapter, when the narrator steps forward and says “hey, I’ve been telling you this story all along.”
A first-person narrator always places a certain interpretive burden on the reader because the reader has to ask how much they can take what is being narrated at face value. At one extreme, we may be dealing with an unreliable narrator – a narrator who can’t be trusted because they are being deceitful or are mentally ill. Edgar Allen Poe is particularly famous for his use of this type of narrator in works such as “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-tale Heart.” We also might encounter a naïve narrator, one who can narrate events but not process the significance behind them for cognitive reasons. Most naïve narrators are children, but a developmentally disabled narrator could also fall into this category, like in the story “Flowers for Algernon.” An unreliable narrator forces the reader to look for clues as to what is actually happening in the world of the narrative, while a naïve narrator makes the reader put in particular work piecing out the meaning and significance of what is being recounted. But even when a first-person narrator isn’t being deceitful, the question of reliability still arises, because characters, like human beings, can only report what they have seen or have heard about, and can only process their experiences through the sum total of values, ideas, and beliefs that philosophers would call their worldview. Even a neuro-typical and honest first-person narrator should make us ask what they are failing to show us and what are the limitations of their outlook.
Even if a first-person narrator is non-participant and goes unnamed, we know that we have a first-person narrator because somewhere they will refer to themselves, generally using first-person pronouns (me and my)—hence the name of this form of narrative point of view. But be careful, a first-person narrator will use lots of third-person pronouns too, sometimes more than they use first-person pronouns, for the simple fact that they will be discussing other characters as well – like with Nick Carraway narrating Gatsby’s life.
Occasionally you will encounter a first-person collective narrator using first-person plural pronouns (we and our), like in William Faulkner’s story “Rose for Emily.” This can either be an actual irrealist collective voice of some group like a community or a group of friends (irrealist because in the real world multiple people can’t actually speak simultaneously with one voice), or someone deigning to speak on behalf of a larger group like a town. In first-person collective narratives pay particular attention to what the point of view is implicitly saying about the beliefs, biases, ideologies, and values of the collective that is speaking.
Third-person point of view: A third-person narrator is a disembodied voice from outside the world of the narrative describing the events that are transpiring. It is referred to as “third-person” narration because it uses third-person pronouns (he, she, it, they) to refer to characters and what they are doing from the outside. But note, as above, that you will also encounter third-person pronouns in other forms of point of view, so ask yourself if somewhere we are keyed into the fact that an individual existing in the world of the text is speaking, even if we don’t know anything about them from the narrative. If not, we have a third-person narrative.
Third-person narration presents a veneer of objectivity and can allow for a broader-angled view of multiple characters, but it of course lacks the human intimacies (and fallibilities) of first-person narration. Third-person narratives are generally sub-divided into three categories, depending on how much direct insight is given into the inner states, that is, the thoughts and feelings, of characters. When we can look into the mind, so to speak, of more than one character, in a line like “John was feeling sad today” or “John said to himself that he must get revenge at the earliest possible juncture,” we call this third-person omniscient narration. Though omniscient means “all-knowing,” as in the Judeo-Christian concept of God, this doesn’t mean that we literally know everything about the world of the narrative and all of the characters in it – that would require, as you can imagine, a book that is infinitely long. Again, it just means that we get direct reportage of the thoughts or feelings of multiple characters.
At the opposite extreme of third-person narration we have third-person objective narratives where we receive no direct view of the thoughts and feelings of characters. We may be able to infer this from the dialogue, gestures, and actions of characters, but third-person objective narration makes the reader attend very carefully to these small details to tease out the motivations and psychologies of characters. This form of narrative is also described sometimes as “fly on the wall” narrative perspective, because we can see and hear everything that is going on just like a security camera (or a fly on the wall) would perceive, but we can’t look directly into the inner states of characters.
Falling between these two forms of third-person narration, or between third- and first-person narration, to think of it another way, is third-person limited omniscient narration, a form of narration in which we only receive the thoughts and feelings of a single character. Sometimes referred to as “over the shoulder” narration, this form of point of view gives us a close intimacy with a single character that is similar to first-person narration, but without its issues of fallibility and reliability.
Second-person point of view: If there is a first- and a third-person point of view, there must also be a second, right? Yes, but it is rare outside of the realm of some forms of adventure fiction written for young adults. This is because of the nature of the second person pronoun, “you.” When you hear the word “you,” as in “hey, you,” or the imperative “open your textbook,” you perk up internally because this is a form of direct address. The second person pronoun, as linguist Roman Jakobson points out, does not have a fixed meaning, it is dependent on the context of the message being sent from the speaker to the addressee (it refers to the person of the addressee). This is what linguists call a “shifter.”
What this means for fiction and narrative point of view is that the second person asks the reader to enter into the narrative world as a character—which you can imagine might require an extreme degree of what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called “the willful suspension of disbelief.” The second-person operates as a kind of disembodied voice like the third person perspective, but only by placing the reader in the narrative (“You are walking down a dark, dusty hallway . . .”). Because of this very different kind of textual interface that it creates, the second-person is rare in works of fiction, particularly literary fiction. Italo Calvino uses it to great effect in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler to explore the natures of reading and of textuality, but you won’t see it very often.
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Works of fiction, particularly longer works like novels, can have shifts in point of view—between different first person narrators or between forms of first-, second-, and/or third-person narration. Some authors in the interwar years like William Faulkner and John Dos Passos used this to attempt the equivalent of what Cubism was doing in the visual arts: to give a deeper, more multi-dimensional take that the medium generally allows by presenting multiple perspectives “simultaneously.” In Dos Passos’s works like Manhattan Transfer and the U.S.A. Trilogy he shifts between first and third person narrators, as well as newspaper accounts and popular songs of the day, to give a dynamic, shifting perspective on a bustling, transformative era in U.S. American society.
Another form of narration that you may encounter, particularly if you are an English major, is stream of consciousness narration. Having its heyday in this same artistically experimental interwar period in the writings of such authors as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, stream of consciousness narration is a form of narrative in which the events of the story unfold along/through the thoughts of a character or multiple characters –the reader is completely embedded in their head (or heads). This isn’t the coherent, composed storytelling of a first-person narrative because the human mind tends to work in ways that are chaotic and disorganized. You may be walking to class and see a dog, which reminds you of your aunt’s dog when you were young, which reminds of a party at her house you attended when young, which reminds you of a very different party you are attending this weekend, which reminds you that you need to buy beer before then . . . Because stream of consciousness narration takes the form of this sort of cognitive bouncing or drifting around, the reader of such a text has to put in a lot of work just sorting out what is occurring literally within the plot.
Analyzing for point of view requires asking what the narrator allows us to see and not see, how much they can be taken at face value and how much we need to read between the lines, both in determining that larger meaning and significance of what is being narrated and in some cases in determining what is literally occurring at the level of plot (is the corpse’s heart really supernaturally still beating in Poe’s “The Telltale Heart,” or is the narrator’s guilt provoking auditory hallucinations?). Point of view, like all of the formal structures of fiction, can also be a way of exploring content through form, in this case of saying something about the limits of human understanding or communication or connection, or about self-delusion or identification or the way the human mind works. Point of view can be subtle and/or sneaky—it doesn’t always stand out in the way that plot, character, and setting do, but it is always there and needs to be taken into account as an integral structuring element in works of fiction, just like camera angle and other forms of shot composition when we are analyzing works of photography and film.
Suggested Short Story Readings to Accompany this Chapter
I find that more unorthodox uses of point of view help students to think more critically about its role in the creation of meaning in works of fiction. William Faulkner’s “Rose for Emily,” with its first person collective narrator, and Isabel Allende’s “And of Clay are We Created,” with its first person narrator impotently watching events unfold over news footage and its shift to the second person in the final paragraph, both work really well in this regard.
