Identifying Point of View Advanced
Identifying Point of View Advanced
When you first learn about point of view, you're taught that something can be written in first person, second person, or third person point of view. However, there's more to point of view than just figuring out what person something is being told from.
It's time to delve deeper into the depths of point of view!
Imagine you're reading a story about the American Revolution and you read the following sentences:
Americans lured the British into the American Revolution under false pretenses. They did not fight fair, which caused the British to lose the war.
You can tell from the sentences that the passage has been written using the third person, but if you look deeper at the point of view, you'll discover something else.
Point of view is the narrator's position in relation to the story being told.
When you read a passage, you want to know:
- Who is the narrator?
- What effect does the choice of narrator have on how the story is told?
Knowing that a story is written using the third person can help you answer the first question, but it doesn't work so well when it comes to helping you answer the second question.
In the case of the sentences above, the choice of narrator has a major effect on how the story is told. From reading the sentences, you can tell that the narrator of the passage did not like the Americans and seems to support the British. In this case, the narrator has a limited perspective and is also biased.
Now imagine you're reading a new version of the story of Cinderella, told from the point of view of her wicked stepmother:
Cinderella's father died and left her without a penny to her name. Since I could not afford to raise another daughter, I decided to fire the help and hire Cinderella on as my maid. She wasn't much of a maid though. Every day, I'd find her wandering around the house, lost in thought, while she was supposed to be doing chores. Naturally, she had to be punished for not earning her keep.
How does the story change when it is written from the wicked stepmother's point of view?
It definitely paints Cinderella in a different light!
There are a few other factors that can help you determine who is telling the story and how the choice of narrator effects how the story is told.
Objective, Limited, and Omniscient Narrators
Stories told from the third person point of view can have three different types of narrators.
An objective narrator has no connection to the story. The narrator's job is to simply share the events of the story in the order that they happened. This type of narrator usually will not share any inner thoughts or feelings that the characters have.
A limited narrator is not a character in the story, but has a special connection to one or a few select characters in the story. This type of narrator will only reveal the inner thoughts and feelings of those characters.
An omniscient narrator is not a character in the story, but knows everything about everyone in the story. This type of narrator knows the inner thoughts and feelings of the narrator and can also give additional information about what has been going on behind the scenes.
Reliable and Unreliable Narrators
Narrators in a story can also be reliable or unreliable.
A reliable narrator tells a story in a way that you believe what the narrator says is true.
An unreliable narrator has a personal bias or tells the story in a way that makes you question if what the narrator says is true. This type of narrator may:
- Take the side of one character more than another
- Show his/her personal opinions
- Give details that do not happen in the story
- Mix up the details of the story
- Leave out important details
- Change the story at a moment's notice
- Pretend to be someone else
- Lie to the reader
So next time you're reading a story, think about whose point of view the story is being told from and how the story might be different if it were told from another point of view.
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