[Point of view] isn't only about a character's viewpoint. It's where character meets language, the actual essense of fiction in print.
--Alicia Rasley.
Point of view is the perspective from which the reader experiences the action of the story. Perspective means perception, thought, and emotion, and POV determines whose perceptions (five senses), whose thoughts, whose emotions you get as you read a passage.
Figure 1.
Figure 1, (left) shows the basic types of POV:
a. Omniscient;
b. Single - first and third persons;
c. Multiple - first and third persons.
Figure 1, (right) shows the elements of POV:
a. Narration;
b. Perspective;
c. Introspection;
d. Voice.
Figure 2.
Figure 2 shows what POV can do for your story:
Give readers the vicarious experience of a certain perspective on an event, such as from Roger Davenport's experience or from Luang Petch's experience.
Create an interactive experience of the story, by inviting readers to participate with the characters and second-guess their decisions and actions.
Increase reader identification, so the POV character's goal and conflicts become, for the moment, important to the readers (keeps them turning pages).
Convey (or conceal) information that is known to a particular character in order to create affiliation (or suspense) with the readers.
Individualize characters and distinguish them from each other by showing how differently each feels and thinks about the same event.
Provide the contrast between the apparent and the internal in order to create subtext.
I'm writing a historical novel and have decided to use first person for the protagonist, Roger Davenport, and third person for Luang Petch, a second protagonist. The book has three parts; the first and third parts are narrated by Roger in first person; the second part centers on Luang Petch, in third person.
How many points of view are you allowed? A general rule of thumb is: Have as few points of view as you can get away with and still tell the story you want to tell.
Caution: Combining Points of View: The Hybrid Story.
What does not usually work is the beginner mistake of combining first person and third person narrative.
However, at least one person made it work brilliantly: William Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury, which combines first-person narrative with a last section featuring Dilsey, a family servant written in third person. You really have to be a Faulkner to get away with this.
Oh well, perhaps it's back to the drawing board!
First Person.
Advantages:
Immediacy. We are inside the character's head, so our experiencing his sensations feels natural and plausible. What's happening to the fictional "I" seems to be happening to the reader "I".
Language. Tells us a great deal about the character, in terms of class and education, before we have so much as one fact.
Range. The character's thoughts range easily over memory, opinion, and impressions because they're his thoughts. We're already inside his head, and these are things people naturally think about.
Disadvantages:
You cannot include any scene at which your POV character is not present.
You cannot include any information that your POV character would not naturally have.
You must include all information that your POV character does have; to do otherwise is considered cheating.
You are limited to your POV character's view of the world. This is why some writers consider first person "claustrophobic." If your POV character is naturally suspicious, then all the other characters must be described in suspicious terms. You can show that another person is actually honorable, but you cannot tell us that because no matter what she does, the POV character will interpret it suspiciously. [I sidestep this problem by opting for at least two points of view.]
The largest danger of first person is that you already have an "I" in your head--yourself. Beginners tend to assume that because you feel a certain way, so will your fictional "I". First-person POV demands that the writer also becomes the "reader" and judge objectively what is written, and not what is in the writer's mind. This limitation is why many writers consider first person the hardest POV to do well.
Points to Ponder:
In one sense, first person seems the most natural mode for storytelling because we all use it all the time. In reality, however, it's not that simple.
The first problem inherent in first person is that it's not natural. People tell others stories about themselves, but they don't tell four-hundred-page stories with perfectly recalled conversations and detailed descriptions.
You can lessen the artificiality of first person with one of two strategems: write a frame story with an introduction that frankly acknowledges that the story is over and the narrator is now looking back on it; or, an older character frankly admitting, before he recounts his story, that it's over. The author continues throughout the whole book to interpose comments from his older self among dramatized scenes of his childhood.
First person is most artificial in its presentation of dialogue. But there's no way around it. Put in all the dialogue in your first-person story, artificial or not.
The great advantage of first-person is not what you can say but how you can say it. This choice of POV allows us to "hear" the natural voice of the character. There is no better way to let us know who your character is than by letting us hear his thoughts in his own words. Is your character cynical? Then his vocabulary will be cynical as well, faintly mocking.
In first person, the author is invisible. He has merged completely with the narrator and thus has no way of giving us information or interpretations that the narrator does not share. The writer must become the character.
It also works well when you want an older-and-wiser character who has learned from life. By telling his own story directly, the more experienced narrator can provide interpretations of events as sophisticated as the author's while recalling the freshness of the character's encounter with the plot when he was younger.
Done well, first person is rich indeed.
Point of view is like perspective in a realistic painting--it changes the size and shape, the nature and identity, of characters, objects, and events in accordance with their proximity to the viewer.
The novel is the only imaginative form that must have both action and point of view, suspense and reflection. In this it seems to mimic the way life feels.
Defoe's great technical innovation was narrating in the first person rather than the third person. It changed the nature of the novel, plunging it into the subjective realm and shifting the balance between the inner life and the outer life. The narrative still moved between actions and reflections, but now the actions were depicted entirely through the filter of the narrator's mode of reflection.
If we take Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White as an example of a novel (a mystery) in which the plot must work, Collins's method, of entering the viewpoints of various characters (all a bit clichéd), works admirably-each diary document pictures the somewhat ridiculous action vividly, implies that there is more here than meets the eye, and hits the special emotional note that character is there to supply. The variety enlivens the proceedings, and the reader is carried along perhaps in spite of herself.
The same is true of Dracula--if we had to see Count Dracula from a single point of view over and over again, he would lose his dangerous powers by becoming too familiar to us; but seeing him intermittently, combined with witnessing each character's speculations and dreads, gives the count power without overtaxing the author's inventiveness.
For many authors, the best combination of clear observation and immediacy is a first-person narrator narrating his or her "unfolding." A wonderful example of this technique is Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John, a short novel about the inner life of an adolescent girl. Kincaid's style, which is very controlled but rich, works to finesse the two most serious pitfalls of first-person narration--the temptation of digressiveness and the tempation of self-dramatization.
If the world of the novel gets too complex to efficiently portray, the first-person narrator can lose himself in the mix and comes off as paler and less interesting than the other characters, but if the narrator seems interested in himself to the exclusion of all the other characters that seem potentially interesting to the reader, he can seem solipsistic and dull.
But views on this vary, and an author can make a case for anything--the contemporary novelist William T. Vollmann's argument for writing in the first person, including theoretical and nonfiction works, is that to write in the first person is to acknowledge that all ideas and opinions are subjective and to take responsibility for them.
Bibliography:
- Nancy Kress, Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint;
Elizabeth Lyon, Manuscript Makeover;
James Moffett and Kennetch R. McElheny, Points of View, An Anthology of Short Stories;
Alicia Rasley, The Power of Point of View;
Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at a Novel.
