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POINT OF VIEW

POINT OF VIEW. First Person. First person singular is most natural Can be language of persona or character (not author). Narrator has different views from author. E.L. Doctorow: “…a novelist is a person who can live in other people’s skins.”

bradley-crosby
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POINT OF VIEW

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  1. POINT OF VIEW

  2. First Person • First person singular is most natural • Can be language of persona or character (not author). Narrator has different views from author. • E.L. Doctorow: “…a novelist is a person who can live in other people’s skins.” • Can explore demons (your own or the world’s) or angels (same).

  3. Narrator • Distance of Narrator helps tell your story • Close: assumes voices • Objective: records things as they appear • Dostoyevski’s Notes from the Underground (Fiction Writer’s Workshop 103) (self-conscious unreliable narrator)

  4. First Person Multiple POV • Use several first person narrators. Example: Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury: “I tried to tell it again, the same story through the eyes of another brother. That was still not it...third brother…still not it…[made] myself the spokesman. It was still not complete.”

  5. Epistolary Fiction • Alice Walker’s The Color Purple writes to God • Visualize a person and write to her. • Steinbeck said to find one trustworthy ear to talk to. • Could be a telephone conversation.

  6. Pros of First Person • Technically the least ambiguous—reader accepts. • Not science! Tells story subjectively. • Can avoid standard English (unlike 3rd person that requires standard Eng.) • May use slang, bad grammar, everyday language. • Direct access to person’s thoughts

  7. Cons of First Person • Can’t look outside or in other people’s heads. • Implies speaker is alive (except in The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold). So there’s less suspense. • Have to invent voice for each story.

  8. Third Person • Omniscient is used infrequently in modern fiction. Fiction Writer’s Workshop 105. • Limited • Subjective resembles 1st person narrative but uses standard English (107-108) • Objective—observe what she is doing, but don’t enter her head. (110)

  9. Limited perspective: author should not intrude • Multiple (Writer’s Workshop 109) • Objective or theatrical has no author’s voice that favors any character (110)

  10. 2nd Person • Author makes believe that she is talking to someone, describing what the person addressed is doing. • The “you” is not the reader, but this approach gives that impression. See Pam Houston’s “How to Talk to a Hunter.”

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