POINT OF VIEW – WHO’S TELLING THE STORY AND HOW
Point of view is the mode of narration employed by a writer to tell his story.
Narration comes from the root word, narrate, which means to ‘tell’ – ‘in detail.’ Thus narration is the act of narrating or telling or conveying a story through written or spoken form.
Point of view is often coloured by the perspective of the narrator whose views may be affected by education or background, especially if it is the first person narrator.
Edgar V Roberts and Henry E Jacobs in their book, Literature: Introduction to Reading and Writing, states that, “To study Point of View is to determine the effects of the speaker’s traits, motives, circumstances and limitations on the literary work.” – they went on to ask – “Does this definition (of point of view) mean that authors do not use their own ‘voice’ when they write, but somehow change themselves into another character who may be a totally different creation?” – They continue, “This is an important question to raise. It is true that authors, as writers of their own works, control what gets written, but it does not follow that they always use their own voice as they write… test yourself: when you speak to your instructor, to your friend, to a child, to a person you love, or to a distant relative, your voice always sounds the same, but the personality or persona changes according to the person you are talking to.”
Their submission means that how you talk to your teacher is different from how you talk to your classmates; how you talk to your sibling or a loved one is different from how you talk to a distant relative. The way you talk to a young child, is also different from how you engage an adult. While your voice remains the same, your persona or the personality you employ at these different times to speak to these people, changes according to the person you are talking to. Put on your imagination.
Roberts and Jacobs also said in their book on Literature that point of view is “… an imaginative creation.”
Put on your imagination. Who you are speaking to, does it affect the way you say the things you say? Does it affect the words you use? Does it not affect the presentation of the story? I think it does.
So, point of view is an interaction of personality and circumstance. Pause and consider it: talking to a police officer investigating a crime and talking to your sibling about that same crime – do you speak freely in both circumstances?
Also, there is an aspect of point of view that is purely physical or material; it doesn’t deal with feelings or emotions. Here, the speaker or narrator can be seen as one who reports actions and statements which he/she observed. Or, the narrator is presented as one who receives information and passes it to other people in the story.
The speaker, voice, persona or narrator may be a participant in an action or event, this lends credence to the story he/she tells. Sometimes, the voice or narrator may have overheard what happened from others or through a letter, newspaper, telephone, etc. The point is that actions and statements in a story must be reported or presented or conveyed in a way that must be believable. This is the work of Point of View.
Opinions and point of view are not the same. Authors may have definite opinions about race, ethnicity, politics or religion, but his speaker or narrator or persona, reports actions and circumstances or events in a detached, objective, subjective, etc., manner depending on what the author wants to achieve.
There is also a difference between point of view and perspective. Point of View (POV) is the type of narrator (first, second or third person) that the author chooses to tell his/her story. Perspective is how the character participant or non-participant processes the story: it is the position and the character of the story teller.
In dealing with point of view, a reader must take cognizance of all that is presented, including the narrator and what he/she says, how he says it and all the information presented in the story. This the reader must do before he or she is able to draw conclusion and interpret.
In telling a story, there are some techniques that a story teller must by necessity employ. These techniques or methods are:
- Narrative voice
- Narrative tense
- Narrative character
- Narrative structure
- Open narrative
- Pace
The Narrative Voice means different kinds of POV. It is the format in which a story is told. Good narrators aim to make each character’s voice in the story distinctive, in a way that readers or viewers can identify with them.
Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, Bruce H. Mann said that a good narrator is a good example of effective character differentiation.
Under narrative voice, we have different kinds: the first person POV which uses ‘I’, ‘We’. In this point of view, the narrator is usually a participant (sometimes, even a protagonist or the focal character). This speaker acknowledges his/her own existence in the story. His/her inner thoughts, emotions, etc. are conveyed to the reader. Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche is written in the first person narrative.
The first person POV also uses the stream of consciousness as narrative mode. In this mode, the narrator relates or reports a character’s thought processes instead of actions and dialogue. It expresses incomplete thoughts, unspoken monologues, unexpressed inner desires, etc. to the reader. It is usually voluminous using James Joyce’s Ulysses as a case study- a true nightmare to my colleagues and me in undergraduate school (smiles).
Still under the first person POV, is the Unreliable Voice. We see in J.D. Salinger’s novel, The Catcher in the Rye, a narrator who is juvenile, biased and unreliable. Sometimes, there is unreliable third person POV. Writers use them to give readers a sense of mystery, disbelief, suspicion.
In The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin, the narrator is the third person limited point of view, and by the end of the story, we knew that the doctor who said the protagonist died of a weak heart which succumbed to ‘the shock of delight,’ gave an unreliable verdict. Readers know that the protagonist’s heart gives way when she learns that her husband is still alive and that she is not free from him after all!
The first person narrative admits also The Epistolary Voice which employs series of letters and other documents to convey the plot of a literary work. Examples are: Mariama Ba’s So Long A Letter; African-American author and poet Langston Hughes’s short story, Passing; French author, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons, C. S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, etc.
The disadvantages are: (a) the narrator is limited because he/she cannot be everywhere, and therefore cannot take on the omniscience by telling readers what is going on in other character’s minds or what actions they are taking elsewhere or intend to take, except what he sees or what is reported to him/her or what he learns through other means. (b) Readers can only see the world of the narrative through the eyes of this limited narrator.
(c) Also, this narrator may be struggling with some personal demons or challenges which would colour their perception of things and thus may not be able to tell the reader the whole truth.
However, a well-known advantage of this form of narrative is that it gives the reader a sense of intimacy with the narrator – giving the reader a sense of sharing confidentialities.
The Second Person POV makes the reader a character in the story. It uses the pronoun ‘You’. It is a rare technique which some authors use briefly in their story before switching off to another technique.
The Third Person POV (objective or dramatic) uses the third person pronoun: ‘he, she, and they’ – this is the technique employed in writing a play or drama. It is a reportage kind of writing where actions and dialogue are reported. Dramatists use description of scenes, stage directions, etc. to tell their stories. They omit characters’ thoughts, emotions and feelings preferring them to ‘tell’ their minds. The viewer or reader cannot get into the minds of the character. Readers and viewers draw conclusions and interpretations from the objective information from the actions and dialogue of characters. Although, these conclusions of the reader are shaped by the author’s careful ordering of the events and speech or the total materials of the literary work.
The Third Person POV (omniscient) – here the speaker or narrator is all-knowing, presenting not only actions and dialogue of the main character, but also the inner thoughts, feelings and responses of the other characters.
It is an excellent literary device that helps in character development. Here, the narrator doesn’t have a voice. He is present, but invisible; he has no personality.
The author moves from character to character showing how they contribute to the plot. Like a video machine, the narrator follows characters around showing their actions, dialogue, inner thoughts and feelings, responses, etc. Presenting characters’ inner thoughts, feelings and responses is a way authors achieve the objective of telling readers the reason why certain actions are taken by the characters in a story.
In real life, an omniscient third person POV is not realistic. No one can perfectly narrate what is going on in the life and thoughts of another. However, in story telling, this technique is very much used, and loved.
Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is written in the third person omniscient POV.
The Third Person POV (limited omniscient) – writers use this technique to convey actions and dialogue from a character’s perspective. Information put out is limited to the activities of a major character: what he says, sees, hears, and thinks. The character in focus may be called the point of view character. All the events are focused on him or her. It is the most popular of all the POV.
Charles Dickens novels are good examples of the third person limited omniscient. Dickens told his stories from the lens of little boys like Pip, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, the events and dialogue revolving around these characters.
Common with all the different kinds of the third person POV is that it uses the pronouns ‘he, she, they’ to tell the story.
There are still other forms of the third person POV. They are: third person free/indirect; third person alternating.
Narrative Tense is about the grammatical tense used in a story which can be present, past or future tense. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie used the present tense in her novel Purple Hibiscus, in the last pages. The author of The Help, Kathryn Stockett also used the present tense. Suzanne Collins also wrote the Hunger Games trilogy in the present tense.
Most novels present stories that already happened thus employing the past tense. Only very view narratives are presented in the future tense thereby taking on the prophetic form.
Point of view is a great tool in the interpretation of a literary work.
