POINT of VIEW

1. POINT of VIEW From whose perspective...?

2. An automobile accident occurs. Two drivers are involved. Witnesses include four sidewalk spectators, a policeman, a man with a video camera who happened to be shooting the scene, and the pilot of a helicopter flying overhead. Here we have nine different points of view and, most likely, nine different descriptions of the accident. In short fiction, who tells the story and how it is told are critical issues for an author to decide. The tone and feel of the story, and even its meaning, can change radically depending on who is telling it. Remember, someone is always between the reader and the action of the story. That someone is telling the story from his or her own point of view. This angle of vision, the point of view from which the people, events, and details of a story are viewed, is important to consider when reading a story. What is Point of View?

3. First Person Point of View I Me My We Our Us

4. First person Narrator • Uses “I” • Story is told from a main character’s Point of View

5. First person Narrator Benefits: • Readers see events from the perspective of an important character • Readers often understand the main character better

6. First person Narrator On the Other Hand… • The narrator may be unreliable—insane, naïve, deceptive, narrow minded etc... • Readers see only one perspective

7. First Person Narrator “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)

8. First Person Narrator FIRST PERSON cont’d “You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but it ain’t no matter.  That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain and he told the truth, mainly.  There was things he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.  That is nothing.  I never seen anybody but lied one time or another...” --Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1881)

9. First Person Narrator 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)

10. Second Person Point of View You Yours Your Yourself

11. Second Person Point of View • Uses “you” • Addresses the reader directly • Makes the reader feel like a character in the story • Least used Point of View in fiction • Often paired with first person

12. Benefits Creates an intense feeling of intimacy between the narrator and the reader Makes the reader feel like a part of the plot (psychologically drawing in the reader) An unusual form Second Person Point of View

13. On the Other Hand … Difficult to use effectively Makes the reader feel like a part of the plot (psychologically drawing in the reader) Overuse can become repetitive Intimacy can possibly alienate some readers Easy to misuse Difficult to maintain over an extended period. Second Person Point of View

14. Second Person Point of View • “Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry; don't walk barehead in the hot sun; cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweet oil; soak your little cloths right after you take them off; when buying cotton to make yourself a nice blouse, be sure that it doesn't have gum on it, because that way it won't hold up well after a wash; soak salt fish overnight before you cook it;” --Jamaica Kincaid, “Girl”

15. Second Person Point of View You are not the kind of guy who would be a place like this at this time of the morning.  But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy.  You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head.  The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge.  All might come clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder.  Then again, it might not. --Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City (1984)

16. Third Person Point of View Third Person Objective Third Person Limited Third Person Omniscient

17. The author uses “he” or “she” to refer to the character. The author states only WHAT CAN BE SEEN; NOT what’s in a character’s mind. Considered “a watching camera” Author adds no comments about feelings or emotions or any other internal sensations. The narrator offers no comment on the mood of the setting—no mention of awkwardness, ease, tension etc... Third Person Objective

18. Third Person Objective The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green.  The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o’clock; in some towns there were so many people that the lottery took two days and had to be started on June 26th, but in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took less than two hours, so it could begin at ten o’clock in the morning and still be through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner.             --Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery” (1948)

19. Third Person Objective "You should have killed yourself last week," he said to the deaf man. The old man motioned with his finger. "A little more," he said. The waiter poured on into the glass so that the brandy slopped over and ran down the stem into the top saucer of the pile. "Thank you," the old man said. The waiter took the bottle back inside the cafe. He sat down at the table with his colleague again. "He's drunk now," he said.  "He's drunk every night."  "What did he want to kill himself for?"  "How should I know."  "How did he do it?"  "He hung himself with a rope."  "Who cut him down?"  "His niece."  "Why did they do it?"  "Fear for his soul."  - “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” by Ernest Hemingway

20. The story is seen through the eyes of one particular character. The narrator reveals only one character's inner thoughts and is not himself or herself a character in the story. Gives the impression that we are very close to the mind of that ONE character, though viewing it from a distance. The narrator uses the pronouns “he” or “she.” Third Person Limited

21. “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) Third Person Limited

22. Third Person Omniscient • The story is told by an “all knowing” narrator • The narrator knows the thoughts and feelings of all the characters • Supplies more information about all the characters and events than any one character could know.

23. Advantage Benefits Free perspective -the author is free to roam at will among all the "minds" in the story. Free motion -the author is free to move about in space and time wherever chosen without regard to a single unifying character or consciousness. Third Person Omniscient

24. Third Person Omniscient On the Other Hand • Focus- the writer who allows no limits to either the characters' minds or the settings runs the risk of losing a focus on the material so that the reader has no "guide" through the experience or a sense of who and what is most important. • Not lifelike; narrator knows and tells all; is truly a convention of literature

25. “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) Third Person Omniscient

26. Third Person Omniscient “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)

27. POINT of VIEW Remember, Point of View = Who is telling the story and how much they contribute. The end.