Point of View:
Inhabiting Our Stories

No problem occurs more frequently in the fiction of inexperienced authors than a mishandled or misguided point of view. At bottom, point of view is a function not of the author’s technical or mechanical prowess or choices, but of the author’s soul, of his ability to inhabit his characters and their world—or not.

51}PLANNING SUBJECTIVITY:
NO POINT OF VIEW, NO STORY

In fiction, means and ends are inseparable; method is substance.

At any given moment, a story or a novel must present us with a particular viewpoint, whether that of a character (or characters) in the story, or that of an outside observer—the so-called omniscient narrator.

But, as with everything else artistic, a choice must be made. You can have all the ingredients—a plot, characters, dialogue, description, setting, conflict—but if they aren’t bound by a specific, consistent, and rigorously controlled point of view, you end up with nothing. Which is why, when confronted with point-of-view errors in a workshop, I may write on the board in fat letters:

NO POINT OF VIEW, NO STORY

I’m not talking about minor gaffes and glitches (“As Sally gazed out the bedroom window the door clicked open behind her and there stood Albert”). I mean errors so fundamental that no amount of line editing can set them right, global blunders that call into question not only an author’s grasp of a particular moment or scene, but of fiction’s primary purpose—which is to render experience, and to do so as vividly, concretely, and authentically as possible.

The way to avoid such blunders is to inhabit our stories and characters—to write not from outside them, mechanically, but from inside, instinctively and intuitively. By positioning ourselves (and our narrators) firmly in the worlds of our stories, we render such blunders practically impossible.

52}POINT OF VIEW:
THE SUBJECTIVITY FILTER

Fiction’s stock in trade is subjectivity. And all experience is subjective. There’s no such thing as a purely “objective” viewpoint in fiction (or, for that matter, in film: Simply by selecting close-ups and camera angles, the director injects biased—therefore subjective— content). Certain details are provided while others are left out, and to that extent the experience has been modified, customized, interpreted. It has passed through a subjective filter.

In fiction, things “happen” only when they affect our characters (see Meditation # 3). To be authentic, experiences must be processed through someone’s subjectivity filter: that of a particular character whose mind and soul the author has chosen to inhabit, or of an omniscient narrator. Alternatively, events may be presented through an objective external viewpoint that edits out all internal emotional content (feelings and thoughts), allowing readers to supply the missing elements and thus create experience.

Hemingway’s short stories illustrate an objective, external vantage point:

He pulled back the blanket from the Indian’s head. His hand came away wet. He mounted on the edge of the lower bunk with the lamp in one hand and looked in. The Indian lay with his head toward the wall. His throat had been cut from ear to ear. The blood had flowed down into a pool where his body sagged the bunk. His head rested on his left arm. The open razor lay, edge up, in the blankets.

“Take Nick out of the shanty, George,” the doctor said.

Here, as in most of Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories, the viewpoint is expressed not by describing the protagonist’s emotional responses to events, but purely by selecting the events to which he responds, with the responses themselves implied and left to the reader. Though void of subjectivity, a filter is very much at work here.

The point-of-view filter may enhance or it may extract, but there must be a filter. Information conveyed to the reader with this filter missing is equivalent to wine without a glass. That is—impossible.

53} LILA’S GRANDFATHER:
THE CASE FOR CONSISTENCY

A student has written:

Hank could have passed for Lila’s grandfather. His white mustache added to his years, yet he kept himself trim and thought himself as fit as the younger fathers. He was nuts about Lila, who still loved him, though lately she had grown distant. She was no longer his little girl; in fact, she secretly wished that he would act his age. She especially hated it when he pretended to pull coins and other things out of her ears. Why was he so goofy? But all adolescent girls pass through a phase where they hold all fathers in mild contempt.

At first glance nothing seems wrong with the paragraph above. But on closer inspection problems arise. While the first sentence (“Hank could have passed for Lila’s grandfather”) is neutral, objective, the second sentence (“thought himself… fit”) shifts us firmly into Hank’s personal, subjective viewpoint. The third sentence (though it presumes to know Lila’s feelings about him) could still be from Hank’s viewpoint. But—unless we assume that Lila’s secret isn’t a secret—the fourth, fifth, and sixth sentences plunge us deeper into Lila’s consciousness. The final sentence steps back to take a global, omniscient view of all adolescent girls’ relationships with their fathers.

The cumulative result of all these subtle shifts is that the reader never knows quite where she stands. The point of view is never clear, the filter is distorted, and the reader’s emotional response is therefore fuzzy and imprecise. We get the information necessary to construct a narrative; but constructing a narrative isn’t the same as inhabiting one. If our readers are to inhabit our stories, we must first do so ourselves.

Point of view can never be incidental or accidental. As choices go, it is as fundamental as the choice between, say, present and past tense, or formal and informal diction, or dramatization vs. exposition.

54} POINT OF VIEW WITHOUT A PLAN:
DEFAULT OMNISCIENCE

In a story about a waitress named Linda, we read this: “People didn’t think Linda was as pretty as she used to be.”

Arguably, this could be Linda’s own view of things; if so, it’s a harsh view, presented with the blunt objectivity of a Gallup poll. Early on in the same story we are told that “Linda was a waitress and an alcoholic; everyone knew that.” Here, too, the point of view could arguably be Linda’s, but for an alcoholic protagonist to have arrived at this blunt self-assessment would require something more in the way of character development. Since this pronouncement is made early in the story—in the first paragraph—a reader can’t be blamed for taking it, not as Linda’s subjective opinion, but as an omniscient narrator’s objective verdict.

Ultimately, however, the story turns out to be Linda’s, presented to us mostly from her viewpoint. As a reader, I’m thrown by those moments when the viewpoint turns omnisciently objective: “Lately, people had been all too concerned about [Linda]”. Or is this still Linda’s subjective viewpoint—wearing an omniscient, objective mask? At best it’s confusing. At worst, it’s inauthentic and unconvincing.

But the problem goes deeper than a few lapses. The problem is that the author hasn’t taken the trouble to embed herself thoroughly, consistently, and purposefully, into her character’s psyche—or into any other mind-set, including that of an omniscient narrator. Had she done so, none of these lapses could have occurred.

In another example, eight-year-old Aidan takes his first plane trip to France. The author sabotages his point-of-view strategy— and his story with it—in three ways. First, he strays into passive constructions: “It was the longest plane trip that Aidan had ever been on.” This sentence locates the viewpoint just beyond the character’s personal, subjective experience. (Compare: “Aidan yawned and shifted in his seat; he’d never been on such a long plane ride before.”) Second, he drifts into omniscience: “[Aidan and his sister] knew they had better behave themselves.” Finally, he slips into diction that pulls us thoroughly out of Aidan’s eight-year-old psyche: “The only dietary adjustment was having to eat goat’s milk for breakfast.” (Compare: “Aidan spat out his breakfast. His mother had served it to him with goat’s milk. It tasted like his armpit.”) In each instance the author has failed to be Aidan, to plant himself—and the reader—decisively in Aidan’s psyche: to see, feel, think, act, and react with him.

By resisting such immersion and commitment, by insisting on mixing our own views with those of our characters, we keep readers at a vague, inconsistent distance. The point of view I get here is neither Aidan’s nor his sister’s, nor that of a rigorously omniscient narrator, but what I call default omniscience: omniscience without plan, passion, or purpose. It fails to provide a consistent, reliable filter for the events described. Whatever it touches it muddies and mutes. It destroys the story as we read it.

No point of view, no story.

55}BENEDICO, THE GREAT DANE:
GENUINE OMNISCIENCE

Does this mean we shouldn’t create omniscient narratives, that we should restrict ourselves to a single, limited point of view in our stories—or to two, or three? No, it means that we should enter omniscience knowingly and thoroughly.

Almost anything we do in our fiction, no matter how outrageous or experimental, can work if done consistently and with conviction. For proof, I offer this paragraph from Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard:

Now, as the voices fell silent, everything dropped back into its usual order or disorder. Benedico, the Great Dane, grieved at exclusion, came wagging its tail through the door by which the servants had left. The women rose slowly to their feet, their oscillating skirts as they withdrew baring bit by bit the naked figures from mythology painted all over the milky depths of the tiles. Only an Andromeda remained covered by the soutane of Father Pirrone, still deep in extra prayer, and it was some time before she could sight the silvery Perseus swooping down to her aid and her kiss.

Here, true omniscience allows di Lampedusa to enter the mind not only of a dog, but also of a mythological figure painted into the floor of the Sicilian villa in which his story is set—all in one paragraph. This, I admit, is omniscience taken to an extreme. Yet because it’s done consistently and with conviction it goes down like a glass of good Sicilian wine.

The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer’s doorstop World War II novel, is likewise omniscient:

Nobody could sleep. When morning came, assault craft would be lowered and a first wave of troops would ride through the surf and charge ashore on the beach at Anopopei. All over the ship, all through the convoy, there was a knowledge that in a few hours some of them were going to be dead.

No one character in Mailer’s novel can possibly know how everyone sleeps or thinks. When wanting to break from omniscience, Mailer uses a device borrowed from Dos Passos that he calls “The Time Machine”²⁷ —interchapter flashbacks that take us deep into the stream of consciousness of individual members of his doomed troop of soldiers. He thus gives us the best of both perspectives, omniscient and intimate.

Less obvious examples of genuine omniscience may be found in many (or most) novels written before 1950, including Carson McCullers’s first—and in my view best—book, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Unlike Mailer, who was already a decrepit twenty-five-year-old geezer when he wrote his masterpiece, McCullers was only twenty-three. Two dozen pages into her book we read:

[The New York café] was still not crowded—it was the hour when men who have been up all night meet those who are freshly wakened and ready to start a new day. The sleepy waitress was serving both beer and coffee. There was no noise or conversation, for each person seemed to be alone. The mutual distrust between the men who were just wakened and those who were ending a long night gave everyone a feeling of estrangement.

Here, too, there is a clear filter—and no question that the filter is omniscient, since it allows us to perceive the feelings of everyone in the town. Unlike di Lampedusa and Mailer, who plunge headlong into unabashed omniscience, McCullers makes her way slowly, gradually, starting off in what might be mistaken for third-person objective, or even for the voice of a peripheral narrator.²⁸ In the third sentence she even hedges her omniscience with “seemed,” implying that her “omniscient” narrator can’t be entirely sure. Indeed, large chunks of the novel are written from a single character’s viewpoint. It’s only when taken as a whole, and in paragraphs like the one quoted above, that the overall omniscience becomes obvious.

In literary fiction, full-throttle omniscience isn’t used as much these days. To inhabit whole platoons of soldiers and Great Danes takes a big soul, and perhaps souls have gotten smaller. Or maybe the concept of an “epic” consciousness no longer fits the times. Perhaps we recognize now, more than in the past, the autonomy of individual natures: that every human heart is distinct. And maybe we are all, to some extent, alone in our own worlds.

Moreover, authorial omniscience (since we know it’s not possible) can feel trumped up, a parlor trick, in an age where information and “facts” are considered so much more valuable than the fruits of imagination. It fails our “authenticity” test—the same test that reality shows, like Survivor and The Bachelor, apparently pass.

56}TOPGALLANT YARDS:
RIGGING A SHIP CALLED FICTION

Too often writers simply neglect point of view completely, failing to make this most crucial of choices. They perhaps think point of view is unimportant, or can be fixed or added later. This is thinking from outside the story and its people, rather than from inside them and their world.

Most teachers fail in trying to teach point of view (as I have mostly failed, too) for just this reason. We speak of “third-person subjective” and “limited omniscience” as if we are describing topgallant yards and second futtocks in rigging a tall-masted schooner—the SS Fiction.

But point of view doesn’t work that way. Trying to revise or “fix” the point of view of a story is like trying to rig a ship that’s at the bottom of the sea. Point of view is a mind-set: not just a way of seeing, but a complete set of interpretive criteria—a sensibility through which readers experience a fictional world, by seeing, feeling, tasting, smelling.

This mind-set stems from character: either a member of the fictional cast, or an omniscient yet invisible host or narrator, or the character of the author himself. Even the most objective, “camera-like” point of view entails a rigorous selection process.

To write without a firm grasp of point of view is much harder than to write with it. It’s harder because we find ourselves writing from outside of our material, mechanically, rather than from inside, organically. We rely entirely on intellect, and our intellects are no match for the sensibilities of our characters.

57}GETTING JACK HOME:
WALKING IN A CHARACTER’S SHOES

That may explain why a passage like this one fails to engage us as much as it might have:

Jack lived a half mile from the mill. His house was on the other side of the river just past Tanner’s machine shop. To get there he would take a right at the American Legion, then a left on Passaic Drive, then another right on Elm Street until he got to the bridge. His house was the third on the right past the bridge, squeezed in between the Hotel and the Café. Jack, his wife, and their three kids lived on the second floor. In good weather the kids would be out playing; in bad they would stay indoors watching television. If she wasn’t working at the diner, his wife would be making supper, in which case Pat, their oldest, would reheat whatever she’d cooked the night before. Jack would change out of his work clothes and boots, wash up, and set the table.

But instead of going straight home, Jack decided to stop in for a shot or two at the River House Café.

The passage fails because it’s been written from outside of the character, and outside of the scene itself. It could succeed were it written without providing Jack’s own sensations, from the vantage point of a detached, camera-like objective observer following Jack home. Or the scene could be written from a godlike, omniscient perspective, allowing equal access to both his objective circumstance and his internal, subjective experience. Or the scene might have been written from Jack’s point of view, filtered entirely through his sensibilities. Instead of the Mapquest-like itinerary of street names and directions, we’d have the experience of a character moving through space, feeling the hot sun or cold air, smelling his dinner cooking, or leaning on the café bar.

None of those approaches is taken here. Here, somehow, through the miracle of default omniscience, Jack manages to be both at home with his wife and children and hoisting a few at the River House Café, simultaneously. Which tells us—since people can’t be two places at once—that Jack is nowhere: that he inhabits no particular time or place. Jack is not a flesh-and-blood character, but only a construct in an author’s mind.

Unless we inhabit our characters and the worlds in which they live, and watch them as if we ourselves were characters operating within that world, our characters will wander through our stories like ghosts; or, worse, they’ll exist merely as bits of information scattered across our pages. Compare:

The main street was quiet and hot, almost deserted. He had not realized until now that it was Sunday—and the thought of this depressed him. The awnings over the closed stores were raised and the buildings had a bare look in the bright sun. He passed the New York Café. The door was open, but the place looked empty and dark. He had not found any socks to wear that morning, and the hot pavement burned through the thin soles of his shoes. …

In the earlier passage, the point of view was tentative to nonexistent. In this scene from The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, the point of view is deep, firm. Carson McCullers inhabited her character and wrote the passage from inside him.

58}A FICTIONAL HOUSE DIVIDED:
SPLIT POINT OF VIEW

That we should inhabit our characters doesn’t mean we should inhabit them all, or all at once.

In a short story especially, it’s usually wise to focus the reader’s viewpoint on a single character. As a reader, I have a limited supply of empathy to invest, so I prefer to concentrate on a single character.

Two points of view are not always better than one.

In a story about two brothers competitive in all things (with Jason always falling short of his older brother, Andrew), adopting a split point-of-view approach works both for and against its subject. On the one hand it heightens the characters’ differences: Andrew shrugging off his conquests, scarcely aware of his little brother’s raging envy, and Jason yearning to be better than Andrew at something, anything. On the other hand, the reader never quite knows which character to root for. When all is said and done, I find myself in the interesting but uncomfortable position of empathizing with Jason while admiring Andrew, meaning my feelings are mixed. Ultimately, I care less about both characters than I might have cared about either one.

Had the story been written from one point of view—it wouldn’t matter which—I’d have cared more. Alternatively, the author could have written a two-scene version of the story, with Scene 1 strictly from Jason’s viewpoint and Scene 2 strictly from Andrew’s (or vice versa)—understanding that the character who gets the last word will leave the deeper impression.

Whatever strategy you choose, remember that your reader has a limited supply of empathy. Make sure it’s invested wisely.

59}INHABITING CHARACTERS:
A SIMPLE EXERCISE

I give my students a simple exercise. I ask them to write a scene in which a man waits for a bus, and to write it from the man’s point of view. You’d be surprised what can go wrong.

Student # 1 reads aloud what he has written:

Frank had been waiting for the bus for nearly forty minutes when his ex-wife, Wilma, who happened to be crossing the street, saw him standing there with his hands in his pockets.

“Stop there!” I interrupt. My student looks up. His face asks:

What’s wrong?

“You’ve violated Frank’s P.O.V.”

“I have?”

“Unless his ex sees him through his eyes, then yes.”

“Oh, right.”

Student # 2 reads:

On a gray winter morning, Harold J. Fingerhut III, a short, plump, and otherwise insignificant-looking fellow wearing a porkpie hat, stood at the corner of Oak and Elm waiting for the Number 9—.

“Stop!”

“What?”

“You say Mr. Fingerhut is an ‘insignificant-looking fellow’?”

“That’s right.”

“According to whom?”

My student looks perplexed, then responds, “Why, Fingerhut.”

“This is how Fingerhut sees himself?”

“That’s right.”

“Are you sure? Are you sure that’s not how you see him?”

“What if it is? What’s wrong with that?”

“Your opinion of Mr. Fingerhut is irrelevant.”

“How can it be irrelevant if I’m his creator?”

“It’s only relevant if you intend to write the scene from your point of view, but the assignment was to write the scene from the man’s point of view. Or did you forget?”

“I guess I forgot,” my student responds sourly.

Student # 3 reads:

Damn these busses, do they always have to run late? For the fifth time in ten minutes Howard Baxter looked at his watch. If that damned bus didn’t come soon there’d be no chance of catching the end of the Super Bowl. He had left work early hoping to get home ahead of the rush, but now already traffic had thickened along Fifth Avenue and it looked as though he was in for it . . .

I let this student keep reading. She has become Mr. Baxter waiting for—and finally boarding—his bus. The story writes itself. No need for me to say, “You’ve done it.” It’s obvious to all of us.

One might have to listen to five or six students before declaring, like Colonel Pickering in My Fair Lady, “By George—you’ve got it!” But sooner or later the point gets made. And the point is this: NO POINT OF VIEW, NO STORY.

I’ll say it again:

NO POINT OF VIEW, NO STORY.

Point of view is the rock on which solid fiction is built. It can’t be added or subtracted afterward, any more than the canvas can be added to a painting.

Let either your character’s or your omniscient narrator’s viewpoint serve as the organizing principle for your narratives, the source of all the ideas and feelings expressed and information conveyed. Nothing should reach the reader that hasn’t passed through the point-of-view filter.

Once more, for old times’ sake:

NO POINT OF VIEW, NO STORY.