STLTYLISTICS LONG QUESTIONS

POINT OF VIEW

 INTRODUCTION:

Narration is the use of a written or spoken commentary to convey a story to an audience.

Narration is conveyed by a narrator: a specific person or unspecified literary voice, developed by
the creator of the story, to deliver information to the audience, particularly about the plot (the
series of events). Narration is a required element of all written stories (novels, short stories,
poems, memoirs, etc.), with the function of conveying the story in its entirety.

The narrator may be anonymous and unspecified, or a character appearing and

participating within their own story (whether fictitious or factual), or the author themselves as
a character. The narrator may merely relate the story to the audience without being involved in
the plot and may have varied awareness of the characters’ thoughts and distant events. Some
stories have multiple narrators to illustrate the storylines of various characters at various times,
creating a story with a complex perspective.

 NARRATIVE POINT OF VIEW:

Narrative point of view, perspective, or voice refers to the choice of grammatical person
used by the narrator to establish whether or not the narrator and the audience are participants
in the story; also, this includes the scope of the information or knowledge that the narrator
presents. So, distinction between the narrators is made on two basis;

The first distinction that is made, following Genette (1980), is between a narrator who is
also a character in the story – a homodiegetic narrator (example Defoe by Moll Flanders), and a
narrator who is NOT a character in the story but in a way hovers above it and knows everything
about it – a heterodiegetic narrator. If the homodiegetic narrator is also the protagonist of the
narrative, it is an autodiegetic narrator (Lennox, Female Quixote).

And according to second distinction, there are three types of narrators;

 First person narrator

 Second person narrator
 Third person narrator

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1) FIRST PERSON NARRATOR:

A first-person point of view reveals the story through an openly self-referential and
participating narrator. First person creates a close relationship between the narrator and reader,
by referring to the viewpoint character with first person pronouns like I and me (as well as we
and us, whenever the narrator is part of a larger group). That is, the narrator openly
acknowledges their own existence. Frequently, the first-person narrator is the protagonist,
whose inner thoughts are expressed to the audience, even if not to any of the other characters.

One major ADVANTAGE of first person narrator is that it immediately puts the reader
inside the narrator’s head, which allows for an intimate portrayal of thoughts and emotions.
Writer can effectively communicate how each moment feels—delivering sight, sound, smell,
taste, and touch—through the prism of their narrator. Reader feels what the narrator feels. Their
fears, their hopes, their love, their despair, all can be delivered to the reader directly and with
maximum emotional impact.

A first person narrator with a limited perspective is mostly considered UNRELIABLE. is

not able to witness or understand all facets of any situation. Thus, a narrator with this perspective
will not be able to report the circumstances fully and will leave the reader with a subjective
record of the plot details. Additionally, this narrator’s character could be pursuing a hidden
agenda or may be struggling with mental or physical challenges that further hamper their ability
to tell the reader the whole, accurate truth of events.

Although it happen frequently, It is not necessary for the first person narrator to be the
protagonist. Examples of supporting viewpoint characters include Doctor Watson, Scout in To
Kill a Mockingbird, and Nick Carraway of The Great Gatsby.

A classic example of a first-person protagonist narrator is Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre

(1847), in which the title character is also the narrator telling her own story,

“I could not unlove him now, merely because I found that he had ceased to notice me”.

2) SECOND PERSON NARRATOR:

The second-person point of view is a point of view where the audience is made a
character. This is done with the use of second-person pronouns like you. The narrator may be
literally addressing the audience, but more often the second-person referent of these stories is
actually some character within the story. Novels in second person are comparatively rare;
rather, this point of view tends to be mostly confined to songs and poems.

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Nevertheless, some notable examples include the novel Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas by
Tom Robbins, the short story The Egg by Andy Weir, and Second Thoughts by Michel Butor.
Here are opening lines of Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City (1984);

“You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the
morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar,
although the details are fuzzy.”—

GAMEBOOKS, including the American Choose Your Own Adventure and British Fighting
Fantasy series (the two largest examples of the genre), are written from the second-person
perspective. Indeed, second-person narrative is a near-ubiquitous feature of the medium,
regardless of the wide differences in target reading ages and role-playing game system
complexity.

Similarly, TEXT-BASED INTERACTIVE FICTION, such as Colossal Cave Adventure and Zork,
conventionally has descriptions written in the second person, telling the character what they are
seeing and doing. This practice is also encountered occasionally in TEXT-BASED SEGMENTS OF
GRAPHICAL GAMES, such as those from Spiderweb Software, which make ample use of second
person flavor text in pop up text boxes with character and location descriptions. Charles Stross’s
novel Halting State was written in second person as an allusion to this style.

3) THIRD-PERSON NARRATOR:

In the third-person narrative mode, the narration refers to all characters with third person
pronouns like he, she, or they. This makes it clear the narration is done without the need for a
narrator who is identified and personified as a character within the story. For the purpose of
comparison to stories that have a narrator, third-person narration is described as having an
anonymous narrator.

Traditionally, third-person narration is the most commonly used narrative mode in

literature. It does not require that the narrator’s existence be explained or developed as a
particular character, as would be the case with a first-person narrator. It thus allows a story to
be told without detailing any information about the teller (narrator) of the story. Instead, a third-
person narrator is often simply some disembodied commentary, rather than a fully developed
character. Sometimes, third-person narration is called the “he/she” perspective, and, on even
rarer occasions, author/omniscient point of view.

The third-person modes are usually categorized along two axes. The first is the
subjectivity/objectivity axis, and the second is omniscient/limited axis. Third person narration,

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in both its limited and omniscient variants, became the most popular narrative perspective
during the 20th century.

 OMNISCIENT OR LIMITED:

OMNISCIENT POINT OF VIEW is presented by a narrator with an overarching perspective,

seeing and knowing everything that happens within the world of the story, including what each
of the characters is thinking and feeling. This narrative point of view has been the most commonly
used in narrative writing; it is seen in countless classic novels, including works by Charles Dickens,
Leo Tolstoy, and George Eliot. It sometimes even takes a subjective approach.

One advantage of narrative omniscience is that it enhances the sense of objective

reliability (that is, apparent truthfulness) of the plot, which may be important with more complex
narratives. The third-person omniscient narrator is the least capable of being unreliable—
although the character of omniscient narrator can have its own personality, offering judgments
and opinions on the behavior of the story characters.

Many stories alternate from one character to another at chapter boundaries, such as in
the A Song of Ice and Fire series by George R. R. Martin. The Harry Potter series focuses on the
protagonist for much of the seven novels, but deviates to other characters on occasions,
particularly during the opening chapters of later novels in the series, which switch from the view
of the eponymous Harry to other characters (for example, the Muggle Prime Minister in the Half-
Blood Prince).

LIMITED THIRD-PERSON POINT OF VIEW is used by an anonymous narrator who follows

one character’s perspective. This is the most common narrative point of view in literature since
the early 20th century. Examples include the Harry Potter books and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.

 SUBJECTIVE OR OBJECTIVE:

SUBJECTIVE POINT OF VIEW is when the narrator conveys the thoughts, feelings, and
opinions of one or more characters. If this is just one character, it can be termed third-person
limited, in which the reader is limited to the thoughts of some particular character (often the
protagonist) as in the first-person mode, except still giving personal descriptions using third-
person pronouns. This is almost always the main character (for example, Gabriel in James Joyce’s
The Dead). Certain third-person omniscient modes are also classifiable as using the third person,
subjective mode when they switch between the thoughts and feelings of all the characters.

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In contrast to the broad, sweeping perspectives seen in many 19 th-century novels, third-
person subjective is sometimes called the “over the shoulder” perspective; the narrator only
describes events perceived and information known by a character. At its narrowest and most
subjective scope, the story reads as though the viewpoint character were narrating it;
dramatically this is very similar to the first person, in that it allows in-depth revelation of the
protagonist’s personality, but it uses third-person grammar. Some writers will shift perspective
from one viewpoint character to another, such as in Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time, or
George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire.

Free indirect speech is the presentation of a character’s thoughts in the voice of the third-
person narrator.

OBJECTIVE POINT OF VIEW employs a narrator who tells a story without describing any
character’s thoughts, opinions, or feelings; instead, it gives an objective, unbiased point of view.
Often the narrator is self-dehumanized in order to make the narrative more neutral. This type of
narrative mode is often seen outside of fiction in newspaper articles, biographical documents,
and scientific journals.

This narrative mode can be described as a “fly-on-the-wall” or “camera lens” approach

that can only record the observable actions but does not interpret these actions or relay what
thoughts are going through the minds of the characters. Works of fiction that use this style
emphasize characters acting out their feelings observably. Internal thoughts, if expressed, are
given through an aside or soliloquy. While this approach does not allow the author to reveal the
unexpressed thoughts and feelings of the characters, it does allow the author to reveal
information that not all or any of the characters may be aware of. An example of this so-called
camera-eye perspective is “Hills Like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway.

This narrative mode is also called third-person dramatic because the narrator, like the
audience of a drama, is neutral and ineffective toward the progression of the plot—merely an
uninvolved onlooker.

 ALTERNATING PERSON:

While the tendency for novels (or other narrative works) is to adopt a single point of view
throughout the entire novel, some authors have utilized other points of view that, for example,
alternate between different first-person narrators or alternate between a first- and a third-
person narrative mode.

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For example, Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife alternates between an art
student named Clare, and a librarian named Henry. Wendelin Van Draanen’s Flipped alternates
between two teen students Juli and Bryce.

One example of a MULTI-LEVEL NARRATIVE STRUCTURE is Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart

of Darkness, which has a double framework: an unidentified “I” (first person singular) narrator
relates a boating trip during which another character, Marlow, uses the first person to tell a story
that comprises the majority of the work. Thus, there is an “I” narrator introducing a storyteller as
“he” (Marlow), who talks about himself as “I”.

 FOCALISATION:

The narrator is the agency that transmits the events and existents of the narrative
verbally. The narrator can recount events from a position outside the story, adopting the
omniscient point of view of someone who, for some reason, knows everything about the story.
However, it is also possible for the narrator to adopt the limited point of view of one character
in the story and in consequence to remain ignorant of what happens outside this character’s
range of perception. This choice of perspective is independent of the question whether or not
the narrator is a character in the story. To express the distinction between narrative voice (who
speaks?) and perspective (who sees or perceives?), Genette has introduced the term
FOCALISATION in order to avoid confusion with earlier usages of the terms ‘point of view’ or
‘perspective’ which is often used to denote narrative voice as well.

Genette’s terms have been modified by Rimmon-Kenan whose definitions are presented
here: An external focaliser is a focaliser who is external to the story (Rimmon-Kenan 1983: 74)
and who is thus also called narrator-focalizer because the focus of perception seems to be that
of the narrator. An internal focaliser is a focus of perception of a character in the story, and
thus also called character-focaliser.

 CONCLUSION

Point of view is a specific trait of short stories and novel. It is up to choice of the author
what type of narration suits his purpose. Each point of view has it’s own unique features
advantages and to some extent disadvantages.

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