POINT of VIEW

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POINT of VIEW

• From whose perspective...?

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What is Point of View?

• 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.

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First Person Point of View

• I
• Me
• My
• We
• Our
• Us

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First person Narrator

• Uses I
• Story is told from a main characters Point of
  View

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First person Narrator

• Benefits
• Readers see events from the perspective of an
  important character
• Readers often understand the main character better

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First person Narrator

• On the Other Hand
• The narrator may be unreliableinsane, naïve,
  deceptive, narrow minded etc...
• Readers see only one perspective

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First Person Narrator

• If you really want to hear about it, the first
  thing youll 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 dont 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)

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FIRST PERSON contd
First Person Narrator

• You dont know about me without you have read a
  book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,
  but it aint 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)

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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)

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Second Person Point of View

• You
• Yours
• Your
• Yourself

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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

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Second Person Point of View

• 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

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Second Person Point of View

• 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.

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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

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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)

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Third Person Point of View

• Third Person Objective
• Third Person Limited
• Third Person Omniscient

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Third Person Objective

• The author uses he or she to refer to the
  character.
• The author states only WHAT CAN BE SEEN NOT
  whats in a characters 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
  settingno mention of awkwardness, ease, tension
  etc...

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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 oclock 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 oclock
in the morning and still be through in time to
allow the villagers to get home for noon
dinner.             --Shirley Jackson, The
Lottery (1948)
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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
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Third Person Limited

• 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.

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Third Person Limited

• 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)

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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.

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Third Person Omniscient

• 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.

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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

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Third Person Omniscient

• 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 mans 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)

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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)

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POINT of VIEW

• Remember, Point of View
• Who is telling the story and how much they
  contribute.
• The end.