Bedford Introduction to literature

Point of View

Point of View signifies the way a story gets told—the mode (or modes) es­tablished by an author by means of which the reader is presented with the characters, dialogue, actions, setting, and events which constitute the narra­tive in a work of fiction. The question of point of view has always been a prac­tical concern of the novelist, and there have been scattered observations on the matter in critical writings since the emergence of the modern novel in the eighteenth century. Henry James' prefaces to his various novels, however— collected as The Art of the Novel in 1934,—and Percy Lubbock's The Craft of Fic­tion (1926), which codified and expanded upon James' comments, made point of view one of the most prominent: and persistent concerns in modern treatments of the art of prose fiction.

Authors have developed many different ways to present a story, and many single works exhibit a diversity of methods. The simplified classifica­tion below, however, is widely recognized and can serve as a preliminary frame of reference for analyzing traditional types of narration and for deter­mining the predominant type in mixed narrative modes. It deals first with by far the most widely used modes, first-person and third-person narration. It es­tablishes a broad distinction between these two modes, then divides third-person narratives into subclasses according to the degree and kind of freedom or limitation which the author assumes in getting the story across to the reader. It then goes on to deal briefly with the rarely used mode of second-person narration.

In a third-person narrative, the narrator is someone outside the story proper who refers to all the characters in the story by name, or as "he," "she," "they." Thus Jane Austen's Emma begins: "Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her." In a first-person nar­rative, the narrator speaks as "I," and is to a greater or lesser degree a partici­pant in the story. J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951) begins: "If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll really 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...."

Third-person points of view

(1) The omniscient point of view. This is a common term for the many and varied works of fiction written in accord with the convention that the narrator knows everything that needs to be known about the agents, actions, and events, and has privileged access to the charac­ters' thoughts, feelings, and motives; also that the narrator is free to move at will in time and place, to shift from character to character, and to report (or conceal) their speech, doings, and states of con­sciousness.

Within this mode, the intrusive narrator is one who not only reports, but also comments on and evaluates the actions and motives of the characters, and sometimes expresses personal views about human life in general. Most works are written according to the con­vention that the omniscient narrator's reports and judgments are to be taken as authoritative by the reader, and so serve to establish what counts as the true facts and values within the fictional world. This is the fashion in which many of the greatest novelists have written, in­cluding Fielding, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Leo Tolstoy. (In Fielding's Tom Jones and Tolstoy's War and Peace, 1863-69, the intrusive narrator goes so far as to interpolate commentary, or short essays suggested by the subject matter of the novels.) On the other hand, the omniscient narrator may choose to be unintrusive (alternative terms are impersonal or objective). Flaubert in Madame Bovary (1857), for example, for the most part describes, reports, or "shows" the action in dramatic scenes without introducing his own comments or judgments. More radical instances of the unintrusive narrator, who gives up even the privilege of access to inner feelings and motives, are to be found in a number of Ernest Hemingway's short stories; for example, "The Killers," and "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." (See showing and telling, under character.) For an extreme use of impersonal representation, see the comment on Robbe-Grillet's Jeal­ousy, under novel.

Gerard Genette subtilized in various ways the analysis of third-person point of view. For example, he distinguishes between focus of narration (who tells the story) and focus of character (who per­ceives what is told us in any part of the story). In Henry James' What Maisie Knew, for example, the focus of narration is an adult who tells the story, but his focus is on events as they are perceived and inter­preted by the character Maisie, a child. Both the focus of narration and the focus of character (that is, of perception) in a single story may shift rapidly from the narrator to a character in the story, and from one character to another. In To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf shifts the focus of character to each in turn of the principal participants in the story; and Hemingway's short story, "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," is a third-person narrative in which the focus of perception is, in various passages, the narrator, the hunter Wilson, Mrs. Macomber, Mr. Macomber, and even, briefly, the hunted lion. See Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (1972, trans. 1980).

The limited point of view. The narrator tells the story in the third person, but stays inside the confines of what is perceived, thought, re­membered and felt by a single character (or at most by very few char­acters) within the story. Henry James, who refined this narrative mode, described such a selected character as his "focus," or "mirror," or "center of consciousness." In a number of James' later works all the events and actions are represented as they unfold before, and filter to the reader through, the particular perceptions, awareness, and re­sponses of only one character; for example, Strether in The Ambas­sadors (1903). A short and artfully sustained example of this limited narration is Katherine Mansfield's story "Bliss" (1920).

Later writers developed this technique into stream-of-consciousness narration, in which we are presented with outer observations only as they impinge on the continuous current of thought, memory, feel­ings, and associations which constitute a particular observer's total awareness. The limitation of point of view represented both by James' "center of consciousness" narration and by the "stream-of-conscious­ness" narration sometimes used by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and others, is often said to exemplify the "self-effac­ing author," or "objective narration," more effectively than does the use of an unintrusive but omniscient narrator. In the latter instance, it is said, the reader remains aware that someone, or some outside voice, is telling us about what is going on; the alternative mode, in which the point of view is limited to the consciousness of a character within the story itself, gives readers the illusion of experiencing events that evolve before their own eyes. For a revealing analysis, however, of the way even an author who restricts the narrative center of consciousness to a single character nonetheless communicates authorial judgments on people and events, and also controls the judgments evoked from the reader, see Ian Watt, "The First Paragraph of The Ambassadors; An Explication," reprinted in James, The Ambassadors, ed. S. P. Rosenbaum (1964). See also persona, tone, and voice.

First-person points of view

This mode, insofar as it is consistently carried out, limits the matter of the narrative to what the first-person narrator knows, experiences, in­fers, or can find out by talking to other characters. We distinguish between the narrative "I" who is only a fortuitous witness and audi­tor of the matters he relates (Marlow in Heart of Darkness and other works by Joseph Conrad); or who is a participant, but only a minor or peripheral one, in the story (Ishmael in Herman Melville's Nick in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby); or who is himself or her-self the central character in the story (Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Villette, Charles Dickens' Great Expec­tations, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye). Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man manifests a complex narrative mode in which the protagonist is the first-person narrator, whose focus of character is on the perceptions of a third party – white America – to whose eyes the protagonist, because he is black, is "invisible." For a special type of first-person narrative, see epistolary novel.