Point Of View Questions
How, What, Why...Huh?
- Narrative viewpoint.
- Narrator / speaker: the one responsible for the telling of the story; not to be confused with author
- POV could be first person (like “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Yellow Wallpaper”), second person (which is pretty rare...example-Italo Calvino's If On A Winter's Night A Traveler), and third person (like “The Storm”).
- First person is a story told by a speaker about the self (Robinson Crusoe)
- The Wikipedia article for Narrative mode is very helpful. They also discuss voice, structure, and tense of a narrative.
Types
Third Person
- “She / He”: story told by a speaker about a third party individual (Sherlock Holmes)
- Subjective- conveying the feelings of one or more of the characters
- Objective- viewing the story without describing any thoughts or feelings of the characters
- Omniscient- viewing the situation from all angles and knowing everything
Omniscient Narration...
- Omniscient Narrator: A narrator who claims (unrealistically) to know the thoughts and feelings of all characters in a story; more likely to be found in science fiction or stories of fantasy. (Middlemarch + Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy) <---Narrating knowing things that happened millions of years before or in future)
- Limited Omniscient: narration of story about third person character in which the narrator is privy to intimate knowledge about the character’s thoughts and feelings (Young Goodman Brown or Harry Potter)
Other Forms...
- Apostrophe: a direct address to something or someone not present (Shakespeare)
- Soliloquy: when a speaker speaks as if he or she is alone (“To be or not to be” + “Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.”
- Dramatic monologue: when a speaker speaks to an unresponsive audience, often unwittingly revealing much of the speaker’s personality (see Browning’s “My Last Duchess”)
- In medias res: Latin for “in the middle of things”; when stories begin in the middle of scenes or events (The Odyssey)
Tell me, O muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy. Many cities did he visit, and many were the nations with whose manners and customs he was acquainted; moreover he suffered much by sea while trying to save his own life and bring his men safely home; but do what he might he could not save his men, for they perished through their own sheer folly in eating the cattle of the Sun-god Hyperion; so the god prevented them from ever reaching home. Tell me, too, about all these things, O daughter of Jove, from whatsoever source you may know them.
So now all who escaped death in battle or by shipwreck had got safely home except Ulysses, and he, though he was longing to return to his wife and country, was detained by the goddess Calypso, who had got him into a large cave and wanted to marry him. But as years went by, there came a time when the gods settled that he should go back to Ithaca; even then, however, when he was among his own people, his troubles were not yet over; nevertheless all the gods had now begun to pity him except Neptune, who still persecuted him without ceasing and would not let him get home.
Seen in Poetics, The Republic, etc
Examples-Greek romances like An Esphesian Tale
Issues to consider...
- Reliability: level of credibility of the information being narrated (The Great Gatsby, Cask of Amontillado)
- In most cases, an author will keep his POV constant, whether it is a character or an omniscient being. However, some authors mix the points of view for a specific effect.
- When reading the stories for this week, look at the point of view for each piece. How does the narrative style effect the stories’ mood? Would the story be different if it were taken from the viewpoint of another character?
Comments (0)
You don't have permission to comment on this page.