Point of View: On How You Look at It

Of all elements of fiction, one of the most important is the author’s control over the information he gives his readers--what information he imparts, how much of it he imparts, and at what point in the story he imparts it.

The author gives his readers information from one of two basic perspectives: (1) his own, or (2) a character’s in the story. Perspective, also called point of view, greatly influences what information the reader will learn and when he will learn it. From the author’s perspective, the story as a whole is laid out like a map under his gaze. He knows everything about all of the characters and he knows exactly what is going to happen. He is looking at the imaginary world of the story from the outside. From the character’s perspective, on the other hand, the story-world looks like the real world looks to us. He doesn’t know what’s going to happen and he doesn’t know much about the other characters--what they are thinking, feeling, or plotting, or even what they are doing when he isn’t around. He may not even know everything about himself. He is looking at the story from the inside, and his view of it is much smaller and more intensified.

Omniscient
When an author writes a story from his own viewpoint--that of looking into the story from the outside--he is using the omniscient viewpoint. He is allowed to act as if he knows everything, and in effect he does: he knows everything about the story that he needs to know in order to tell it.

Because he knows everything, he knows what each of the characters is thinking, feeling, or doing at any time. He is ‘God-like,’ telling the story from the perspective of one who sees everything and knows everything.

He can also foreshadow what is going to happen; he can say things like, ‘little did Arthur know that his plans would be terribly altered...’
Arthur doesn’t know it, but the author does and so does the reader. If a person were to come up to you in real life and say, ‘If you had only known where the villain was at this moment, you would not have been feeling so sure of yourself,’ you would probably think him rather odd. But in a story you do not mind the author’s omniscience. It is, after all, his story and he can tell it how he likes.

Limited
A story told from a character’s viewpoint which only tells some of the facts and implies that the whole of the circumstances is not known is called a limited viewpoint. Even though the author can’t tell as much to the readers with this sort of viewpoint, it is used extensively in literature written from the late-nineteenth century onwards. The benefit of telling the story from the viewpoint of one of the actors in it makes the readers feel as if they are actually in the story as well, taking part in what is happening through the medium of a character.

The limited viewpoint is extremely personal, taking place mostly inside the head of the person whose viewpoint it is told from. The story is interpreted through the character’s eyes; his own worldview and biases influence what is being told to the reader.

Sometimes the author jumps from one character’s head to another’s, which is called shifting viewpoints. This technique belongs more in the category of the omniscient viewpoint, since in real life you can’t get inside someone else’s head (at least I never have). But it is still limited to some extent because you are only allowed to know what one character knows at a time. Shifting viewpoints gives the readers a wider view of the story, as well as giving them a deeper understanding of the characters whose viewpoints are used.

The main character usually gets a monopoly on the point of view, the readers being shown more of his inner workings than those of any of the other characters. This is because the character the readers know best tends to become the main character for them, regardless of his part in the story.

Sometimes the author puts himself in the story, although he may only be one of the side characters. In this case, he is usually no longer omniscient. Since he is inside the story as well, he only knows some of what is going on. This is not a rule--just a logical application.

Objective
When writing from either the omniscient or limited viewpoint, the author may take an objective or subjective approach. In objective writing, the author takes a ‘newspaper-reporter view,’ relating merely the apparent events and not the many interesting things that are going on inside the people concerned with those events.

An objective writer might say,
‘The crowd seemed pacified by the statesman’s apparently earnest speech.’
The readers would not know whether the crowd was actually satisfied with the statesman, or whether the statesman really was in earnest. This approach leaves much to be guessed by the readers.

Although it is fun to experiment with, the completely objective approach is not used very much because it lends an extremely impersonal feel to the story. The readers are not able to sympathise very well with any of the characters because they can only see what the characters are doing or saying--they can’t see how the characters really feel about things or what is making them do what they do. The readers can’t understand the characters completely.

The only way to overcome this problem is to do as playwrights do (who write in the objective omniscient viewpoint) and make the characters converse with the audience in asides, as in Hamlet’s famed soliloquy, ‘To be, or not to be...’ But this is not what people ordinarily do in everyday life and therefore book authors don’t like to use asides much. A sentence such as, ‘“He’ll never know I put poison in his glass,” murmured the villain,’ is not very convincing.

In science-fiction or other genres where the human, personal element is lacking, the objective approach becomes effective because it gives the story a cold, austere, almost metallic feel. The readers don’t need to know what a bunch of robots are thinking, after all; the important thing is what the automatons do.

Subjective
The subjective approach focuses on the character’s internal thoughts, conflicts, inferences, etc. It is far more personal, but do not confuse being personal with necessarily being better. Some authors choose to write exclusively in the subjective, resulting in what is called ‘stream of consciousness’ voice. As the name suggests, this is a very odd, and potentially dull, genre.

Facts told from a highly-subjective viewpoint are strongly coloured by a character’s own ideas of the facts, as in the limited viewpoint. The readers only know what the character’s impressions of outside events are. The readers can’t be certain that what the character is telling them has really happened the way the character perceives it.

In most stories a combination of subjectivity and objectivity is used, and a good author will carefully balance the two so as to give the readers as much useful information as possible.

Using Perspective

Person
The three persons are first (I, we), second (you), and third (he, she, they). The omniscient viewpoint is almost always narrated in the third person. The author is usually not in the story at all and is telling about a completely separate set of mortals, referring to them as ‘they,’ ‘he,’ ‘she,’ etc. It is, however, possible to write a story in the first or second person omniscient viewpoint in certain circumstances. (For instance, a first person omniscient narrator may have died and gone to heaven and now knows everything about what happened to him in the story.)

Limited viewpoint can also be told in either first, second, or third person, third and first person being the most common. First person tends to be the most intimate of the three voices, especially if the main character is the narrator, however, depending on how deeply the author enters into the world of his character, third person can be just as intensely personal.

Second person is rarely used, being a more recent digression from an established form. In my own opinion, I object to being told what I think or do (or have thought or have done; or would think or would do) by someone who has never met me. The second person can be used to good effect in some instances where a character in the story is being told by another what happened to him, but either first or third person is almost always a more logical choice.

Tense
There are three main tenses: past, present, and future. In most stories, save perhaps some time-travel thrillers, only one tense is employed predominately throughout. The most commonly-used tense for story-telling in the English language is the past tense, although present and future tense have also been used with varying degrees of success.

Although the fact will undoubtedly disappoint the implementalists, the tense an author uses to tell a story does not greatly influence the story. The human brain, after accustoming itself to an unfamiliar style, will automatically convert the written material into its basic sense without paying any further attention to the tense. Thus, attempting to create a new genre by telling a story in the present or future tense, or other variants such as perfect or pluperfect, is simply an interesting exercise and not a useful endeavour.

Head Hopping
If you choose to ‘head hop,’ or shift viewpoints, throughout a story, it is best to start out with one character’s (probably the main character’s) perspective and make sure it is well-established before going on to someone else’s. This gives the readers a solid base for their understanding of the rest of the story. It’s also best to limit yourself to only a few characters’ perspectives throughout the story in order not to confuse your readers.

Telling a story from only one character’s perspective gives a more personal feel to the story and allows the readers to empathise with that character more freely. However, if you intend to stay in one character’s head throughout the story, you must take into account that there may be information pertinent to the story that that character, and thus the readers, will never receive. Sometimes the character whose perspective you choose to use is not the main character. In this case you will probably have trouble keeping this character from becoming the main character, but this approach can be very useful. In the Sherlock Holmes adventures Dr. Watson narrates the story, even though he is only a minor character. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did this on purpose because he wanted the readers to only be able to see through the eyes of a bystander. The readers don’t get to know how Holmes solves the mystery step by step in his head: they only get to hear the answer to the mystery when Holmes explains everything to Dr. Watson.

I-ing
One of the most difficult parts of writing in the first person is stepping into the shoes of the I. ‘I,’ whoever he may be, tells the story in his own words and in his own way. If a man is writing a story from the viewpoint of a woman, or an adult from the viewpoint of a child, etc., he could potentially run into difficulties.

The item of first importance is getting inside of the brain of I. If I am a child, then the first thing I think when I see an ice cream cone is probably not going to be, ‘Aha! an isosceles triangle!’ If a female author were writing from the perspective of a man, she must take care not to make I notice that I’s wife has gotten a haircut or a new hat.

Think how you would tell about something that happened to you; then think how your character would tell it. His style may possibly be different from yours. Know your character so well that you become ‘I’. --At least for the duration of the story.

The Unreliable Voice
There are many useful things that perspective allows an author to do. Again, the most important is that of controlling what the reader gets to know about the story. One fascinating facet of this is, as mentioned earlier, that when an author tells the story solely from a character’s perspective the readers only get to know what that character knows. An author may take this idea one step further to only letting the readers know what the character tells them, thus creating a sense of unreliability in the point of view.

This unreliability could be caused by a positive desire to deceive on the part of the narrator, or could be, as is more often the case, simply the result of his naivety, unrecognised biases, or incomplete knowledge of the facts. He could be telling what he thinks is the truth, but through the way he says it the author insinuates that the narrator is mistaken.

It takes some astuteness on the part of the reader to understand what the author is really saying, but in this way authors sometimes reveal the message of the story. Henry James’s novel, What Maisie Knew, is told from the perspective of a small girl in a very grown-up world. She doesn’t understand things, but she is observant enough to notice things that are easily interpreted by the mature reader. James chose to use a child’s perspective in order to contrast the dark features of the story with the innocence of childhood.

Although point of view is often forgotten amid all the other less subtle elements of the story, it is, as illustrated above, an integral part of the story’s over-all tone and meaning.