CHAPTER 4
POINT OF VIEW: THE COMPLETE MENU
BY VALERIE VOGRIN
When I consider a photograph of myself taken from several feet away I see a caricature—comically high eyebrows and a crooked chin. When my mother looks at me she sees herself as a younger woman, sort of. When my husband gazes at me he sees a big smile and bright eyes and a mop of tousle-ready hair and twelve years’ worth of complicated history. From a traffic helicopter I am one of many toy-size drivers inching my way up Interstate 5. What makes me in turn humorous, poignant, beautiful, and insignificant is point of view. Point of view (also referred to as POV) is equally influential in fiction writing.
Consider the story of a lovers’ triangle. Imagine how you might respond to that story presented primarily from the point of view of the husband, left at home with his young son over Thanksgiving weekend while his wife slips away for a ski trip with her lover in Vermont. Now how would you respond if the same story was presented from the point of view of the unfaithful wife, whose husband hasn’t made love to her, or spoken a kind word to her, in four years, since she was six months’ pregnant; or from the point of view of the lover himself, recently flunked out of law school, adrift in the world, desperate for someone to tell him what to do next? Or what if this story’s events are observed by some fourth party, such as the young son or a private detective hired by the husband to spy on his wife?
There you have it—more than anything else, the point of view you choose for your story or novel will affect the way readers respond emotionally to your characters and their actions. Your choice of point of view will also influence other elements of your piece, such as tone and theme. Depending on who is narrating the lovers’ triangle story, the tone of the story could be repentant, cruel, caustically funny, wistful, or bitter. The story’s theme could be the improbability of marriage, the slippery slope of fidelity, the sacred nature of vows, the tenuousness of love, the fickleness of women, the perfidy of men, etc. And all of this depends on the point of view the writer chooses for the story. As I was saying, pretty darn powerful, this POV business.
Point of view is my favorite topic to teach. I like that there are so many variations to consider. Yet I also appreciate that POV is based on a very basic concept: things look different depending on who is doing the looking and what their vantage point is. Point of view, like microscopes and telescopes, can reveal things ordinarily unseen. But point of view is something of an underdog, in that many writers, inexperienced and experienced, don’t give it a second thought. Poor, misguided fools.
When it comes right down to it, POV deals with the following issues:
There are a multitude of ways to handle these issues, and this makes POV a rather complex topic. It’s like you’ve just walked into a restaurant for the first time. You’re hungry, unfamiliar with the cuisine, and the host hands you a three-pound menu, twenty laminated pages of culinary possibilities. To a novice fiction writer, the array of point-of-view choices may appear just as overwhelming. There, under entrees, is something called “third-person multiple-vision point of view.” Huh? Does that come in a red sauce?
This is one reason why some writers just shrug and point to something on the menu that sounds familiar. A better bet might be to spend some time with someone who has your best interests at heart, such as me. Thus I will perform the duties of a shrewd, seasoned waiter, walking you through the menu, helping you make informed choices.
FIRST PERSON
A story told from the first-person POV is narrated by a character in the story, usually the story’s protagonist. The narrator tells the story of what I did. If the story is about a crime, the narrator is at the scene of the crime. As the police cars pull up, lights flashing, the narrator might be standing in a pool of blood holding a switchblade, or watching from the backseat of the getaway car, or peering out the window of a second-story apartment across the street. The narrator is the story’s eyewitness, the reader’s means of perception. The reader experiences the fictional world through the narrator’s eyes and ears and nose and skin.
I saw my wife laughing as she parked the car. I saw her get out of the car and shut the door. She was still wearing a smile. Just amazing. She went around to the other side of the car to where the blind man was already starting to get out. This blind man, feature this, he was wearing a full beard! A beard on a blind man! Too much, I say.
As demonstrated in this example from “Cathedral,” the narrator does more than simply observe. Here we are getting the narrator’s take on what he sees.
Now watch how the first-person narrator in Margaret Atwood’s story “Weight” tells us what she thinks and how she feels.
I am gaining weight. I’m not getting bigger, only heavier. This doesn’t show up on the scales: technically, I’m the same. My clothes still fit, so it isn’t size, whatever they tell you about fat taking up more space than muscle. The heaviness I feel is the energy I burn up getting myself around: along the sidewalks, up the stairs, through the day. It’s the pressure on my feet. It’s a density of the cells, as if I’ve been drinking heavy metals.
There’s nothing standing between this character’s consciousness and the reader.
When writing in the first person, you are also writing in the voice—the words and tone—of the character. Writers often create memorable voices for their first-person narrators. Here’s Richard, the narrator of Thorn Jones’s “Cold Snap”:
Son of a bitch, there’s a cold snap and I do this number where I leave all the faucets running because my house, and most houses out here on the West Coast, aren’t “real”—they don’t have windows that go up and down, or basements (which protect the pipes in a way that a crawl space can’t), or sidewalks out in the front with a nice pair of towering oak trees or a couple of elms, which a real house will have, one of those good old Midwest houses. Out here the windows go side to side. You get no basement. No sidewalk and no real trees, just evergreens, and when it gets cold and snows, nobody knows what to do.
Jones convinces us that we’re hearing Richard’s voice for ourselves. Richard might be sitting two stools down from yours at the local tavern, close enough that you can smell his whiskey breath.
The first-person narrator may even use the reader as a confidante, perhaps addressing the reader directly. I chose to do this in my story “Who Can Say Otherwise?” in which a teenage girl narrates the unlikely story of her love affair with a middle-aged rock star:
I’m telling you this so you know, so I can try to explain how it is. You’ll see the pictures in the tabloids and say, “But she’s no one special!” and of him, looking a little less dissipated, but with that same famous, wasted face, you might ask, “What’s wrong with that man?” I’m writing against all that.
Sometimes a narrator addresses a specific someone. For example, Philip Roth’s narrator in Portnoy’s Complaint, Alexander Portnoy, relates his story to his psychoanalyst. The narrator may tell her story to herself in the form of a diary, as in Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary. J. M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron consists of a single book-length letter written by a mother to her daughter. Though this kind of thing isn’t necessary, you might find it helpful in choosing your narrator’s words if you imagine what kind of person the narrator is speaking to.
The main advantage of first person is intimacy. The writer can eliminate almost all distance between the reader and the story by placing the reader into the narrator’s skin. Also, the narrator’s voice can reveal a lot to the reader about the kind of person he is. When we hear Richard speak in “Cold Snap” a picture forms in our minds. We would be surprised to see this guy show up wearing Italian loafers or a pinkie ring.
But the first-person POV does offer some challenges. The writer is stuck in the narrator’s skin, along with the reader. All you have to work with is that one character’s observations and thoughts. You’re not free to wander anywhere, physically or mentally, unless your narrator comes along.
You’re also limited by the intelligence and vocabulary of the first-person narrator. Say your story is about an eleven-year-old girl who wants to spend the summer with her ballet-teacher mother in New Orleans despite the fact that her father, an uptight D.C. lawyer, refuses even to consider it. Is the girl up to the job of telling her own story? How mature is she? Does she understand enough about her divorced parents’ relationship to make it clear to the reader? Will her observations be interesting enough to keep the reader involved in the story? After all, some eleven-year-olds would make splendid, entertaining companions on a long train trip and others you’d want to shove off the train at the first stop.
YOUR TURN:
Get inside someone’s skin. Write a passage from the first-person POV of a person walking to a mailbox to send a difficult letter—breaking up with someone, confessing something unpleasant… Then pick another character also walking to a mailbox to deliver a difficult letter and write from that character’s first-person POV. These characters can be anyone you like, but make them the opposite sex from each other and quite different in age. Remember, this is first person, so you should inhabit these characters and tell things the way they would tell them.
FIRST PERSON: MULTIPLE VISION
Most often first person uses just one first-person narrator, but occasionally there are multiple narrators. A short story writer is confined by space, and more than one narrator will usually play havoc with the writer’s ability to create a tight, coherent story. But a novelist, working with plenty of elbow room, may decide that a story will be strongest if more than one witness describes the story’s events.
In the novel The Sweet Hereafter, Russell Banks uses four first-person narrators to tell and retell the same basic story of a tragic school bus crash: the bus driver, a man whose two small children were killed in the crash, a New York City negligence attorney hoping to make some big bucks off the bereaved, and a teenage girl who will never walk again as a result of the accident. Each character gets a shot at telling his or her own story. The book is divided into discrete sections in which each character presents his or her own version of the truth. The reader hears from Billy Ansel, the young father:
And then there were the folks who wanted to believe that the accident was not really an accident, that it was somehow caused, and that therefore, someone was to blame … Naturally, the lawyers fed off this need and cultivated among people who should have known better. They swam north like sharks from Albany and New York City . . . slipping their cards into pockets of mourners as they departed from the graveyard, and before long that segment of the story had begun—the lawsuits and all the anger and nastiness and greed that people at their worst are capable of
The reader may consider Mitchell Stephens, Esq., to be a vulture, but perhaps there is more to him than that:
People immediately assume we’re greedy, that it’s money we’re after, people call us ambulance chasers and so on, like we’re the proctologists of the profession, and, yes, there’s lots of those. But the truth is, the good ones, we’d make the same moves for a single shekel as for a ten-million-dollar settlement. Because it’s anger that drives and delivers us.
But Nichole Burnell, the girl who is now paralyzed, someone who can reasonably be assumed to have reason to be angry, has a different take on it:
It just wasn’t right—to be alive, to have what people assured you was a close call, and then go out and hire a lawyer, it wasn’t right… Not if I was, like they said, truly lucky… There was no stopping Mom and Daddy, though. They had their minds made up. This Mr. Stephens had convinced them that they were going to get a million dollars from the State of New York and maybe another million from the town of Sam Dent. Daddy said they all have insurance for this sort of thing; it won’t come out of anybody’s pocket, he kept saying; but even so, it made me nervous.
Banks actually forces the reader to participate in making the story’s meaning by deciphering the similarities and differences among the versions. Who is telling the truth about the accident? Whose motives are noble and whose are not?
One variation on the multiple first-person narrator POV uses the epistolary technique—the story is presented as a series of letters exchanged between characters. Though this technique was more common in centuries past, appearing in novels such as Pamela and Les Liaisons Dangereuses, it still turns up in contemporary fiction. An extremely popular recent example is the Griffin & Sabine trilogy by Nick Bantock.
On rare occasions, such as in William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” you’ll see the first-person plural, where we is used instead of I even though one person is usually speaking for the we.
One of the chief strengths of first-person multiple-vision POV is the reader’s intellectual involvement in the story. It doesn’t allow the reader to sit back and be told what to think and feel. The reader must piece things together for himself, which can make for an interesting reading experience.
You might choose this point of view for your own novel if your characters have strikingly different perspectives and you want readers to hear each character’s voice directly and to draw their own conclusions. Of course, many writers find it’s not that easy to create a single strong convincing voice, much less a handful of them. And you will almost certainly lose some of the focus of first-person singular as the reader slips in and out of several characters’ skins.
FIRST PERSON: PERIPHERAL
Although the first-person narrator is usually the protagonist, you may choose to have your first-person narrator be another character in the story. A famous example of a peripheral narrator is found in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Most of the events narrator Nick Carraway describes in the novel concern the misadventures of the protagonist, Jay Gatsby. Nick’s primary job is to observe and relate the story, as he does here:
And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dreams must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it.
The peripheral point of view is effective when the story’s protagonist is blind to his or her own actions and when that blindness or its consequences are significant enough to strongly affect someone who stands outside the action, as in The Great Gatsby.
Say you want to write the story of a failing marriage in which both spouses believe themselves to be the injured party. The point of the story is that they’re trapped, blind to the wider sense of the truth. So a better choice for a narrator than either the husband or the wife might be someone who is capable of observing things fully, such as the couple’s adolescent son. There’s nothing he can do to help his parents. He can only watch and learn—that’s what makes him peripheral.
But there’s a real challenge with this POV as the narrator must report on the protagonist while stuck in the body of a bystander. Nick isn’t Gatsby’s shadow. He has to go home sometimes. And he’s only just met Gatsby. A writer often has to get creative to work around a problem like this, as when Fitzgerald has Nick’s (sort of) girlfriend, Jordan, relate the history of the romance between Daisy and Gatsby.
THE UNRELIABLE FIRST PERSON
In a sense, all first-person narrators are somewhat unreliable. Even the most scrupulous characters may, unconsciously perhaps, shade the truth or emphasize one fact over another to make themselves look ever-so-slightly better. A boy telling the story of his sister running away from home might not want to own up to his role in her unhappiness. Even an honest fellow like Nick Carraway may distort the truth a bit.
However, if the answer to the question Who is speaking, for example, is an autistic person, a very young child, a psychopath, a cat, a jealous lover, or a habitual liar, the reader understands that the ordinary skepticism does not apply. This narrator has extraordinary limitations and her version of the facts is not to be trusted.
The reader understands after only a few sentences that the narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” is insane, although he tries to convince us otherwise:
True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease has sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and of the earth. I heard many things in hell.
In Poe’s story the narrator’s madness leaves the reader off balance, unable to distinguish between the narrator’s delusions and reality. The narrator’s unreliability adds to the story’s unsettling effect. Contemporary writers have used unreliable narrators to underscore my point—that there’s no such thing as a reliable narrator. The unreliable narrator emphasizes the philosophical view that there is no such thing as a single, static, knowable reality.
Using an unreliable narrator forces the writer to create two versions of the truth, a steep challenge. But if the POV is handled well, the results can be quite intriguing.
YOUR TURN:
Write a passage from the POV of an unreliable narrator who skews the facts, intentionally or unintentionally. For example, what might a child at a boisterous cocktail party hosted by her parents confide about the guests? What erroneous conclusions might she draw from their behavior and their jokes? Might her false equations add up to cold, hard truths? Of course, if you favor a deluded or deceitful character, go for it. Whomever you pick, see if you can make a reader understand the narrator’s unreliability.
THIRD PERSON: SINGLE VISION
With the third-person point of view the narrator is not a character in the story. The narrator is a voice created by the author to tell the story. The narrator tells the story of what he did or what she said. Third person has numerous variations with unwieldy names. Never fear. These variations are quite manageable when broken down into their parts.
Perhaps the most prevalent version of the third person is the third-person single vision. With this POV, the narrator has access to only one character’s mind. Thus, single vision refers to the way the narrator views a story’s events—through the eyes of a single character. The story is told by the narrator, from the perspective of a single participant in the action. The character whose point of view is being recognized by the author is called the point-of-view character. (This term really applies in any type of POV.) The entire story is filtered through the point-of-view character’s consciousness.
In the short story “Earth to Molly,” Elizabeth Tallent intends for the reader to understand that the opinions the narrator expresses are Molly’s:
At the hotel, really a shabby bed-and-breakfast, the landlady, pinching her upper lip in displeasure at having to hoist herself from her chair, let Molly into her room and left her with the key. The landlady was a long time retreating down the hall. The dolor of her tread, with its brooding pauses, was not eavesdropping but arthritis. Molly was sorry for having needed her to climb the stairs, but of course the old woman complained her stiff-legged way up them all the time, showing lodgers to their rooms. Why, oh why, would anyone spend the night here? A prickly gray carpet ran tightly from wall to wall. It was the color of static, and seemed as hateful.
Notice that it’s Molly who is thinking, “Why, oh why, would anyone spend the night here?” just as the details concerning the carpet are filtered through Molly’s consciousness.
While this narrator seems to stand just behind Molly’s shoulder, or perhaps even lurk in her mind, the third-person narrator may also stand back at a little distance. This may create an ironic or comic effect, as in this description in Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim of an aspiring academic reacting to a tiresome joke by his superior:
[Dixon] tried to flail his features into some sort of response to humour. Mentally, however, he was making a different face and promising himself he’d make it actually when next alone. He’d draw his lower lip in under his top teeth and by degrees retract his chin as far as possible, all this while dilating his eyes and nostrils. By these means he would, he was confident, cause a deep and dangerous flush to suffuse his face.
With many of the advantages of first person (the reader empathizes with the point-of-view character much as she does with a first-person narrator), employing an “outside” narrator allows the writer to craft the language in ways that may be implausible coming from the mouth of a first-person narrator. Also, if your narrator is a fictionalized version of yourself, allowing the third-person narrator to tell the story avoids the appearance of self-indulgence.
The third-person single vision is an excellent POV if your point-of-view character is someone with limited intellectual powers or verbal skills. For example, what if the girl who wants to spend her summer vacation with her mother in New Orleans is autistic? Even though she may be quite perceptive, she can’t tell her own story if she doesn’t have the words to describe what her world is like. The situation would be similar with a character who has little formal education. No matter that he’s the smartest person in the story, you’ll probably find that a narrator with a greater facility with language will be more successful in conveying the character’s shrewdness than the character himself.
The disadvantage of this POV—perhaps the only one—is that the point-of-view character must be present for everything that takes place in the story, just as with a first-person narrator. If your point-of-view character overhears a conversation, she may report that to the reader. However, if the conversation takes place in a health-food store across town, the discussion is off-limits.
YOUR TURN:
Imagine an incident in a department store in which a salesperson and a customer clash over something—shoplifting, rudeness, racial misunderstanding … Using the third-person single-vision POV, write a passage detailing this clash through the eyes of the customer. As is customary with third-person single vision, include the character’s thoughts.
THIRD PERSON: MULTIPLE VISION
As with first-person POV, a writer using the third-person POV may decide that two or more heads are better than one. The multiple-vision POV allows the writer to show a story’s events from different angles.
This point of view is most often used in longer pieces of fiction—novellas and novels. In a shorter piece you might find that you don’t have the room to develop numerous point-of-view characters. After all, the reader needs to know fully who these people are in order to make sense of what they’re thinking and feeling. Indeed, writers often arrange the perspectives of the point-of-view characters to emphasize their differences.
In The Watch, a novella by Rick Bass, the three point-of-view characters are Hollingsworth, the middle-aged proprietor of a country story in Mississippi, his seventy-seven-year-old father, Buzbee, who has run away to live in a tree in the woods, and Jesse, a cyclist-in-training. The following paragraphs represent two of these characters:
Hollingsworth would sit on his heels on the steps and tremble whenever Jesse and the others rode past, and on the times when Jesse turned in and came up to the store, so great was Hollingsworth’s hurry to light his cigarette … that he spilled two cigarettes, and had barely gotten the third lit and drawn one puff when Jesse finished his Coke and then stood back up, and put the wet empty bottle back on the wire rack, waved, and rode off, the great backs of his calves and hamstrings working up and down in swallowing shapes, like things trapped in a sack.
The first thing Jesse did in the mornings when he woke up was to check the sky, and then, stepping out onto the back porch, naked, the wind. If there wasn’t any, he would be relaxed and happy with his life. If it was windy—even the faintest stir against his shaved ankles, up and over his round legs—he would scowl, a grimace of concentration, and go in and fix his coffee.
Both characters have active inner lives, but Hollingsworth directs his thoughts outward. He craves companionship; in an earlier section we see that he invents names for the other riders in Jesse’s group. Jesse is self-absorbed. The wind has no existence for him except as a condition affecting his ride each day. These are my conclusions as a reader, conclusions Bass intends for me to draw.
As a general rule you should make distinct transitions between point-of-view characters. You do not want your reader to be unsure of whose eyes are witnessing the events of the story. Rick Bass never switches point-of-view characters mid-paragraph, and he uses white space on the page to mark the transition for the reader. Novelists often make this switch at a chapter break; that is, each chapter belongs to a single point-of-view character.
Many fine novels use this technique of alternating points of view. Sometimes each point-of-view character gets equal time. But a book may be dominated by one point-of-view character, with only occasional switches to a secondary character’s viewpoint. Sometimes the points of view alternate in a pattern and the reader becomes less conscious of the switches as she reads on. In Happenstance: Two Novels in One About a Marriage in Transition, Carol Shields’s switcheroo between the husband’s and wife’s point of view is impossible to ignore—the reader must turn the book over to begin the second half. And in another POV twist, Shields gives no instructions or even hints as to which half should be read first. The reader’s experience of the book is literally in his own hands.
No matter what variation or twist you choose, if you elect to use more than one point-of-view character make sure you have good reason. There’s no sense in it if the characters view the world in nearly identical terms. As with first-person multiple-vision stories, much of the interest is generated by the disparities and similarities that emerge between the points of view.
Third-person multiple vision also provides a wider view, often creating an effect like a collage. In The End of Vandalism, Tom Drury, the writer, has different episodes seen through the eyes of multiple characters, with the result being a picture of an entire made-up world—Grouse County. The focus is on the community.
With access to more than one character’s thoughts the writer gains flexibility. Your story may seem roomier once you leave the confines of a single character’s head. In a third-person multiple-vision POV, each character’s experience is interesting, but the writer highlights what’s most interesting by juxtaposing the various viewpoints.
As occurs with first person, the flexibility you gain with multiple viewpoints costs you focus. The reader’s attention and concern are spread more thinly. But this can just as easily be seen as an advantage. With the addition of just one more consciousness the reader is immediately engaged in a more complex way. The reader must observe and draw conclusions based on how the different characters’ beliefs contradict or confirm each other. The reader’s divided sympathy may be the point of the story.
You might show, for instance, how disastrous it would be for one sympathetic character if another sympathetic character’s desires are fulfilled. First you introduce Lily, a young widow, as a point-of-view character, showing the reader how desperate she is and how hard she’s trying to be a good mother, and what awful luck has brought her to this place, alone and broke and applying for a job as an attendant at a Laundromat, a job that would allow her to keep her toddler son with her while she worked. (Did I mention that the boy has a rare degenerative disease for which the only promising treatment centers are two thousand miles away?) Then in the next chapter you introduce a second point-of-view character, Jack, who recently lost his hand in a farming accident. He’s behind on his car payments and his thoughts are on his beloved dogs, four retired seeing-eye dogs, and the few pieces of dog food rattling in the bottom of the twenty-pound bag. And inevitably, in the way of stories, Jack applies for the same job as Lily because he wants to stay in town and try to get his bearings while he decides what to do next. This is a job he can perform one-handed while he learns to use his prosthetic hand. Now you’ve engaged the reader by putting him in a very thorny spot. Who should he root for? Which of these wretched souls is more deserving? Multiple-vision points of view can add the desirable kind of complexity to a story, the kind that honors the way our lives are entwined and our sympathies are divided.
YOUR TURN:
Return to the previous exercise, the one with the clash at the department store. Write a passage about the exact same incident through the POV of the salesperson. Then write again about the same incident, this time from the POV of an innocent bystander. You will then have viewed this department-store clash through the eyes of three different characters. Who has the most interesting point of view on this incident?
THIRD PERSON: OMNISCIENT
Think “god’s-eye view.” Think Zeus enthroned at the top of Mount Olympus, the archetypal deity peering down from heaven. Omniscient means all knowing, and thus the writer is always omniscient; the writer should always know everything there is to know about each character and the setting, and every event related to the story, past, present, and future. What distinguishes the omniscient point of view is that the writer who employs it is free to share directly some, or all, of this vast amount of information with the reader.
In each of the points of view I covered earlier, essential information is filtered through the consciousness of one or more of the characters. In the third-person omniscient point of view, the story’s information is filtered through the narrator’s all-knowing consciousness. Through the omniscient narrator you have the ability to do any of the following: enter the mind of any or all of the characters, interpret the story’s events, describe incidents unobserved by any of the story’s characters, provide historical context for the story, and inform the reader of future events.
Prior to the twentieth century, most fiction employed omniscient narrators, including many of the big names in literature such as Fielding, Dickens, Tolstoy, Flaubert, and Austen. Their omniscient narrators often had authoritative, opinionated voices, like the one we hear in Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle:
Whoever has made a voyage up the Hudson must remember the Kaatskill Mountains. They are a dismembered branch of the great Appalachian family, and are seen away to the west of the river, swelling up to a noble height and lording it over the surrounding country. Every change of season, every change of weather, indeed every hour of the day, produces some change in the magical hues and shapes of these mountains, and they are regarded by all the good wives, far and near, as perfect barometers.
Soon thereafter a variety of social changes occurred related to the rise of democracy (and the decline of empires), Freud, religious skepticism, feminism, and so forth which over time resulted in the (now seemingly paternal, heavy-handed, one-sided, bigheaded) omniscient point of view falling out of favor with contemporary writers. Once enough writers traded in omniscience for more limited points of view, this kind of omniscience seemed old-fashioned and fell out of favor. Yet it is still an effective device.
Here’s a twentieth-century example of omniscience from Eudora Welty’s “No Place for You, My Love”:
They were strangers to each other, both fairly well strangers to the place, now seated side by side at luncheon—a party combined in a free-and-easy way when the friends he and she were with recognized each other across Galatoire’s. The time was a Sunday in summer—those hours of afternoon that seem Time Out in New Orleans.
The moment he saw her little blunt, fair face, he thought that here was a woman who was having an affair. It was one of those odd meetings when such an impact is felt that it has to be translated at once into some sort of speculation.
With a married man, most likely, he supposed, slipping quickly into a groove—he was long married—and feeling more conventional, then, in his curiosity as she sat there, leaning her cheek on her hand, looking no further before her than the flowers on the table, and wearing that hat.
He did not like her hat, any more than he liked tropical flowers. It was the wrong hat for her, thought this Eastern businessman who had no interest whatsoever in women’s clothes and no eye for them; he thought the unaccustomed thing crossly.
It must stick out all over me, she thought, so people think they can love me or hate me just by looking at me. How did it leave us—the old, safe, slow way people used to know of learning how one another feels, and the privilege that went with it of shying away if it seemed best? People in love like me, I suppose, give away the short cuts to everybody’s secrets.
Welty’s narrator enters the minds of both characters. She also interprets the characters’ reactions and draws definite conclusions. Yet she is gentle, not insistent. There’s room for the reader to draw his own conclusions.
As some contemporary writers have discovered, omniscience doesn’t require adopting a biblical tone or throwing the literary equivalent of thunderbolts. A modern and more subtle form of omniscience appears in works by Andre Dubus, Michael Ondaatje, Nicola Barker, Ellen Gilchrist, and Alice Munro, to name a few.
Postmodern writers, such as Milan Kundera, have adopted a conspicuous form of omniscience, eschewing verisimilitude. They call attention to the novel as a made thing. They flaunt their godlike powers. For example, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera often interrupts the flow of the story to comment on the story, its themes, or fiction itself:
It would be senseless for the author to try to convince the reader that his characters once lived. They were not born of a mother’s womb; they were born of a stimulating phrase or two from a basic situation. Tomas was born of the saying “Einmal ist keinmal.” Tereza was born of a rumbling of a stomach.
The first time she went to Tomas’s flat, her insides began to rumble. And no wonder: she had had nothing to eat since breakfast but a quick sandwich on the platform before boarding the train . . .
Once Kundera has made his point, reminding us of the fictional nature of his characters, he returns to their story.
When you think about it, omniscience represents freedom. And freedom is good, yes? Instead of being limited by the intelligence and maturity and sanity of your characters, omniscience provides you with a way to take charge, to make sense of your characters’ bizarre behavior or the customs of the planet you just invented.
You can use omniscience to create suspense by supplying the reader with information unknown to the characters. The narrator might inform the reader that even as Sue and Harry prepare for their wedding a giant wave is approaching their town and that when the tsunami strikes in one hour only one of them will survive. Or the narrator might tip off the reader that Miss Harriet Wood, beloved by her first-grade students and their parents and school administrators and stray dogs everywhere, is entertaining a dangerous criminal in her home, and not a representative from an educational book company as she believes. The narrator can make Miss Harriet’s story downright painful for the reader, as he anxiously turns the page, hoping against hope that Harriet will get a clue before this villain can harm her.
However, there are reasons why omniscience is used rarely now. Omniscience usually calls attention to the presence of the writer—an undesirable thing for writers who want their readers to suspend their disbelief willingly. Omniscience may seem impersonal to the reader, who is used to being asked to care for a particular character or characters. Omniscience is not for the faint of heart; most writers find it’s easier to manage POV when they’re limited to revealing the thoughts of just one or two characters. Too much freedom makes them dizzy, like riding a unicycle across the high wire without a net.
YOUR TURN:
Using the omniscient POV, write a scene in which something gets broken at a wedding reception. A gift, a bottle of champagne, somebody’s heart… Demonstrate at least three of the five omniscient powers—entering the mind of any character, interpreting events, describing unobserved incidents, providing historical context, revealing future events. There is plenty of opportunity here, as there are bound to be many people in attendance. Relish your godlike ability to know and see everything.
THIRD PERSON: OBJECTIVE
This is the ultimate POV challenge, a real test of your abilities to reveal information in scenes. The narrator in the third-person objective point of view is denied access to even a single character’s mind. The writer must reveal everything about the story (background, characterization, conflict, theme, etc.) through dialogue and action. The effect is a bit like reading a journalist’s account of events, getting only the hard facts.
In his story “Little Things,” master short story writer Raymond Carver demonstrates that he’s up to the challenge of this point of view:
He was in the bedroom pushing clothes into a suitcase when she came to the door.
I’m glad you’re leaving! I’m glad you’re leaving! She began to cry. You can’t even look me in the face, can you?
Then she noticed the baby’s picture on the bed and picked it up.
He looked at her and she wiped her eyes and stared at him before turning and going back to the living room.
Bring that back, he said.
Just get your things and get out, she said.
He did not answer. He fastened the suitcase, put on his coat, looked around the bedroom before turning off the light. Then he went out to the living room.
She stood in the doorway of the little kitchen, holding the baby.
I want the baby, he said.
Are you crazy?
No, but I want the baby. I’ll get someone to come by for his things.
You’re not touching this baby, she said.
This unnamed couple goes back and forth, arguing about who gets the baby. Ultimately, gruesomely, each grabs hold of the child and, Carver deadpans, “in this way the matter was decided.” This isn’t the kind of thing most people want to believe they’re capable of. How could Carver ever convince us of the thoughts a mother or father might have that would allow them to act so atrociously? The objective POV solves the problem for Carver. By reporting the events rather than trying to explain them, he makes what occurs credible.
The primary strength of the objective point of view is that it offers a sense of integrity and impartiality. Objective POV prevents a writer from overexplaining because the writer can’t really explain anything at all.
Here’s the downside. One of fiction’s major attractions is that we, as readers, are allowed insight into the murky minds of others—unlike in real life, where we are left guessing at what’s behind a boss’s costly dentistry, a child’s smirk, a lover’s raised eyebrow. The opacity of the objective POV denies us these insights. A story told in objective POV is like a flower minus its scent and vivid colors, a vaguely interesting oddity perhaps, but not likely to attract much attention.
YOUR TURN:
Take the wedding reception passage from your omniscient POV exercise, and revise it using the objective POV. Employ your powers of observation and describe what takes place, as though you are a journalist writing a news account. Remember, this time you can’t enter anyone’s head. But, what does the behavior of the characters reveal about their thoughts?
SECOND PERSON
As with the third-person points of view, second-person POV stories are told in the voice of a narrator. In second person, however, the narrator tells what you did or said.
When Jay Mclnerney published his novel Bright Lights, Big City in 1987, his use of the second-person point of view created quite a stir in literary circles. His choice of POV was denigrated by some critics as a gimmick. Readers couldn’t remember seeing this done before, and they certainly weren’t accustomed to being addressed like this by a narrator:
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 … Your brain at this moment is composed of brigades of tiny Bolivian soldiers. They are tired and muddy from their long march through the night. There are holes in their boots and they are hungry. They need to be fed. They need the Bolivian Marching Powder.
The novel’s POV caused many readers to get the sensation that they were the protagonist, the barhopping, late-night snorter of cocaine. Though the book was a best-seller, other novelists didn’t rush to follow suit. The POV choice felt like a novelty act—a how-many-times-do-you-need-to-watch-a-man-eat-a-car type thing.
Lorrie Moore employed the second-person POV quite differently in her collection of short stories Self-Help. The narrators of many of the book’s stories (i.e., “How to Be an Other Woman” and “How to Become a Writer”) mimic the advice-giving voice of self-help writers. This is from the story “How”:
Begin by meeting him in a class, in a bar, at a rummage sale. Maybe he teaches sixth grade. Manages a hardware store. Foreman at a carton factory. He will be a good dancer. He will have perfectly cut hair. He will laugh at your jokes.
A week, a month, a year. Feel discovered, comforted, needed, loved, and start sometimes, somehow, to feel bored. When sad or confused, walk uptown to the movies. Buy popcorn. These things come and go. A week, a month, a year.
Make attempts at a less restrictive arrangement. Watch them sputter and deflate like balloons. He will ask you to move in. Do so hesitantly, with ambivalence. Clarify: rents are high, nothing long-range, love and all that, hon, but it’s footloose. Lay out the rules with much elocution. Stress openness, non-exclusivity. Make room in his closet, but don’t rearrange the furniture.
Imagine what you could do with this. What would be the title of your “self-help” short story?
I must tell you, however, that the second person is closely associated with Mclnerney and Moore. Second person has possibilities and it’s quite fun to use, but if their goal is publication, it’s up to other writers to make it their own—to make it fresh—by using it to create a different effect.
One writer who has done so recently is Helen Dunmore in her novel With Your Crooked Heart:
You lie down on the warm stone, and wriggle your body until it fits. Then you relax, and the terrace bears you up as if you are floating out to sea. Sun has been pouring onto it since seven o’clock, and every grain of stone is packed with heat. Sun pours on to the glistening mound of your belly, on to your parted thighs, your arms, your fingers, your face. No part of you resists, no part does not shine. The moist lips of your vulva are caught in a shining tangle of hair.
Though I do feel the odd sensation, at first, of being addressed, I don’t think Dunmore’s motives for using second person have much to do with directly addressing the reader. Instead, I hear the voice to be narrating a particular character’s experience, putting words to a set of feelings and sensations that would otherwise be unexpressed. I find the voice to be quite intimate, as if the narrator is whispering in the character’s ear as she lies in the hot sun. If you can find a compelling way to use the second-person POV, go forth and conquer. Otherwise, proceed with caution.
YOUR TURN:
Rewrite one of your first-person POV passages using the second-person POV. Though you may do little more than switch the pronoun / to you, the effect may be profound. And feel free to change anything you like to fit this new POV. Compare the two versions and consider the different emotional impact of each.
DISTANCE
Early on I stated that one of the questions POV answers is From what distance are the events being viewed? And yes, it’s one more thing to factor into your point-of-view decision-making.
EMOTIONAL DISTANCE
This is the distance that we sense between the narrator and the characters, a distance that affects how close the reader feels to the characters. We usually think of emotional distance as an abstract idea, like asking someone, How close do you feel to your sister? But with POV this distance can actually be measured, if we think about it in terms of camera distance:
Long shot: The man hurried through the cold night.
Medium shot: The man hurried through the night, squinting against the cold.
Close-up: As the man hurried through the night, he felt the bitter cold air on his lips.
If the narrator is close enough to feel the cold on the character’s lips, we presume the narrator’s empathy for the character—very little emotional distance.
Often a writer will pick a camera distance, so to speak, and stick with it for the entire story. But sometimes the camera distance will change during the course of the story.
Jane Smiley opens her novel A Thousand Acres with a panoramic shot:
At sixty miles per hour, you could pass our farm in a minute, on County Road 686, which ran due north into the T intersection at Cabot Street Road… Because the intersection was on this tiny rise, you could see our buildings, a mile distant, at the southern edge of the farm. A mile to the east, you could see three silos that marked the northeastern corner, and if you raked your gaze from the silos to the house and barn, then back again, you would take in the immensity of the piece of land my father owned, six hundred forty acres, a whole section, paid for, no encumbrances, as flat and fertile, black, friable, and exposed as any piece of land on the face of the earth.
Because this land is at the center of the novel’s conflict, it is important that Smiley establishes it as a physical, known presence. Yet we wouldn’t choose this distance for an entire story or book if we wanted the reader to care about the characters. At this distance the characters would be specks. That distance changes in the next chapter. Smiley zooms the camera in on her narrator, so close the lens could touch her skin:
Linda was just born when I had my first miscarriage, and for a while, six months maybe, the sight of those two babies [her nieces], whom I had loved and cared for with real interest and satisfaction, affected me like a poison. All my tissues hurt when I saw them, when I saw Rose with them, as if my capillaries were carrying acid into the furthest reaches of my system.
TIME DISTANCE
If it isn’t specified, we normally presume that the events in the stories we read occurred relatively recently. In this case we might say there is very little distance in time between the narrator and the story. Though the story is written in past tense (as most are) a writer often creates the effect of immediacy—of the story occurring just now, as we read:
A young man said he wanted to go to bed with Alexandra because she had an interesting mind. He was a cabdriver and she had admired the curly back of his head. Still, she was surprised. He said he would pick her up again in about an hour and a half. Because she was fair and a reasonable person, she placed between them a barrier of truthful information.
In this, the opening passage of Grace Paley’s story “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute,” we are meant to be drawn into the present of the story—Alexandra’s thinking about how to react to the cabdriver and the hospital visit to her father that the cabbie is driving her to.
Writers occasionally try to narrow this time distance by telling the story in the present tense, as Margaret Atwood did in her novel Surfacing:
He feels me watching him and lets go of my hand. Then he takes his gum out, bundling it in the silver wrapper, and sticks it in the ashtray and crosses his arms. This means I’m not supposed to observe him; I face front.
Does this sound more immediate to you than the previous passage? Well, yes, and that’s the intent. But because past tense has been a convention of fiction for so long, most readers now find its use invisible. Formerly quite unusual, present tense doesn’t upset many soup bowls anymore.
Sometimes a writer specifies that the events of the story took place long ago, creating a substantial time distance. When this occurs, the reader may feel that the story is tinged with nostalgia or that the account may be in some other way suspect, memory having been eroded over time. The distance is striking in George Eliot’s story “The Lifted Veil,” which begins:
The time of my end approaches. I have lately been subject to attacks of angina pectoris; and in the ordinary course of things, my physician tells me, I may fairly hope that my life will not be protracted many months.
The narrator goes on to reflect on the span of his lifetime. He tells us, “my childhood perhaps seems happier to me than it really was, in contrast with all the after-years.” Several pages later he’s leaped ahead to describe his young adulthood: “At Basle we were joined by my brother Alfred, now a handsome self-confident man of six-and-twenty, a thorough contrast to my fragile nervous ineffectual self.”
In an instance like this, when the reader is aware that the story’s events occurred long ago, the emotional urgency and suspense of the story may be diminished. In Eliot’s story we know the narrator is about to die—there’s no hope of a different outcome to the story’s events. But this kind of time distance allows the narrator to tell the story with an interesting perspective, often fusing emotions of both the past and the present.
THE POV CONTRACT
What you must never forget is that point of view establishes a contract with the reader. POV tells the reader what kind of story he is reading. Break this contract and you risk losing the reader’s trust in you. Thereafter the story will never feel quite “real” to the reader. You will distract the reader from the smooth red-carpet-like unfolding of your story.
Novice writers sometimes break the POV contract with a careless slip. One of my fiction students chose a third-person limited single-vision POV for her story, the point-of-view character being Barbara, the CEO of a cosmetics company. Thus, the contract is this: all the events should be filtered through Barbara’s consciousness.
My student’s story was moving right along, with competent handling of character development and conflict. Then, bang! The narrator entered the head of a minor character and the story stumbled, like so:
Barbara spent the next ten minutes listening to her accountant. She couldn’t focus on the papers Ted waved in front of her or his words. All she could think of was of the message John had left on her answering machine. I’m heading to Montana. I know this is sudden and I feel like a jackass, a cliché, but I’ve really got to get away and figure some things out.
She pushed back from her desk and grabbed her jacket from the chair. She thanked Ted for his attention to detail. “And as soon as I finish with today’s meetings I’ll look over these ledger sheets.”
Once again feeling dismissed and belittled, and wondering why he kept working for such an ungrateful boss, Ted began to gather up the papers from her desk.
“You can leave those papers where they are, Ted. I said I’d get to them later.”
No offense to administrative assistants, but in this story Ted has a walk-on role. His only reason for existence in the story is to inform Barbara that one of her trusted employees has been embezzling. My student confessed she hadn’t even noticed the lapse. To adhere to the POV contract while still revealing Ted’s attitude, my student can simply describe Ted’s actions. She might rewrite the offending paragraph to read:
Ted sighed and started to gather up the papers from her desk. “Fine, just fine,” he muttered, “I’il just go sit in my corner and wait meekly for the madam to summon me.”
As a safeguard against POV abuses, you might write down your point-of-view rules regarding omniscience, reliability, and distance. When you finish a draft you can check every paragraph against these rules.
But as many a recording artist knows, contracts are made to be broken. Occasionally a very daring writer will break the POV contract deliberately, to achieve a special effect—when that is what the story needs.
In Richard Russo’s Empire Falls, the preface is presented by an omniscient narrator. Then a third-person narrator follows the protagonist, Miles Roby, for two chapters; we get a chapter told from the POV of Miles’s estranged wife and one (suddenly switching from past to present tense) from the POV of Miles’s daughter. Thereafter Russo establishes a pattern of third-person multiple vision, the vision shifting with chapter breaks. But, wait, in chapter 7, we’re in a tavern and the POV suddenly starts shifting back and forth between the tavern’s owner and the only two customers in a way that looks suspiciously like omniscience. However, none of this feels careless. The author wants us to view the inhabitants of this town in a slightly unpredictable manner and we trust that he knows what he’s doing.
HOW TO CHOOSE
As I warned you, the POV menu is complicated, but I hope you’re beginning to feel comfortable with it. And I’m betting that by now you’re convinced that your choice of POV is one of the biggest choices you will make with a piece of fiction. As stated earlier, it affects everything. As with all significant and complex decisions, your task will be easier if you’re able to narrow your choices.
I suggest asking yourself, Whose story is this? Many times you’ll be able to answer immediately. Stories written in the first person usually do belong to the narrator, just as stories written in third-person single-vision POV usually belong to the point-of-view character. That character most often has the most at stake. Whether the reader thinks the story has a happy ending depends on whether the point-of-view character thinks it does. If your story clearly belongs to a single dominant character, then first person or third-person limited is the obvious choice. Then it’s just a matter of deciding if you want the story told in the character’s voice or not.
Stories populated by extended families, blended families, marriages, soccer teams, submarine crews, and people linked by a situation (as in The Sweet Hereafter) often have more than one protagonist. Many times each and every character has a goal, and frequently the goals conflict with one another. In this case you must ask yourself, What’s most interesting to me about this story? Say your story is about a prestigious jazz quintet in which the trumpet player, after a dozen years with the group, wants out. As you consider this scenario, are you most interested in how the trumpet player struggles with his feelings of obligation and the obstacles the other four musicians create? If so, use one of the single-vision POVs. Maybe, however, you are most intrigued by what happens to the group as a whole. Does a leader emerge? Do any of the other members secretly work to help the trumpet player? Will the group be able to stay together if the trumpet player succeeds in leaving? Your interest in the group’s story doesn’t necessitate a multiple-vision or omniscient point of view; perhaps there is one character who can act as the spokesperson, providing the eyes and ears for the whole group—but you will at least want to consider them because of the flexibility they offer.
Another question you can ask yourself is as basic as it gets. What kinds of stories do I like to read? If you had a whole glorious weekend to read—if by some miracle you weren’t going to be allowed to do anything but read—what would you pick up first, a multigenerational epic or an intense story with a memorable protagonist? Are you most interested in psychological dynamics—what happens to one person as she faces adversity or social dynamics—or in how individuals react and play off one another as they struggle to achieve their individual goals? Which movie better suits your tastes, Rocky or A League of Their Own?
You can’t, however, be confident you’ve found the best POV for your story when it’s just an abstract idea. You need to taste that POV. Just as the wine connoisseur holds a sip of wine in her mouth and swirls it across her tongue and cheeks to get the full effect, you need to discover how the POV feels on the page. Does it sound like you expected it to? Does it have the complexity of flavor your story needs?
You may be able to learn all you need with only a page or two of a draft. You may reach a bull’s-eye certainty after considering only a couple of points of view. Then again, maybe not.
I wrote half a novel in first person because my inspiration came in the form of a sentence landing in my head on my morning walk. The voice said, “My name is Eleanor Sweetleaf and I’ve lived in this house since I was three days old.” Who was I to argue with inspiration? But a year or so later I was stuck. Eleanor Sweetleaf was a good soul, but not quite the right voice for the story after all. She took her story a little too seriously. After grinding my teeth for a while, I began rewriting in the third-person single-vision POV—a better choice, I quickly realized. The revised story was funnier and I felt freer to play with language. Once I let go of my death grip on first person I found I was also willing to change other aspects of my story. My husband was horrified at first; he didn’t understand how I had failed to realize sooner that I was writing in the wrong point of view. He felt bad about all that “wasted” work. But what he didn’t know (yet) was that writing is all about trial and error. And he also didn’t know that it’s the writer’s duty to fully exercise the enormous power of point of view.