Elements of Literature
Point of View: Who Tells the Story? by John Leggett
Who’s Talking?
You’ve probably noticed, in your life as well as in books, that who is telling a story has a lot to do with
what gets told.
The standpoint from which a story is told is called point of view. There are three points of view you’re likely to come across in your reading and use in your writing: omniscient, first person, and
third-person limited.
The Know-It-All
In a story told from the omniscient point of view, the narrator is outside the story and knows everything that happens and everything that goes on in the minds of all the characters:
As the musher lay trying to recover, he realized how much
trouble he was in. “The dogs could be miles away by now,” he
thought, wincing.
Above the gully, Obeah growled and pulled the team around. He
knew they had to get back to their musher—but how?
The omniscient narrator can describe the thoughts and feelings of different characters in the story. This narrator may also reveal information unknown to some or all of the characters—including what is happening in several places at the same time. This point of view reminds the reader of an important truth: that there is more than one side to every story.
Me, Me, Me, Me, Me
The first-person point of view is the “I” point of view. Writers normally use the first person when they tell stories about their own lives. If you’ve ever written a letter or kept a diary, you’ve almost certainly written in the first person.
Like nearly all autobiographies, Gary Paulsen’s Woodsong is told from the first-person point of view of the writer:
“Shock and pain came in waves and I had to close my eyes
several times. All of this was in minutes that seemed like hours,
and I realized that I was in serious trouble.”
In fiction narrated from the first-person point of view, the “I” who speaks is not the writer but a character in the story. That character is usually the main character, but not always. If Paulsen rewrote Woodsong as a novel, he might choose to tell it from the first-person point of view of his lead dog:
I was having the time of my life tearing down that new trail at the
head of the team. All of a sudden I noticed how light the sled felt.
I looked around, and there was our musher lying on the ice down
in the gully.
He Said, She Said
In the third-person limited point of view, the story is also told from a single character’s standpoint—but here the character is referred to in the third person, as
he or she:
Shock and pain came in waves and Paulsen had to close his eyes
several times. All of this was in minutes that seemed like hours,
and he realized that he was in serious trouble.
This point of view is popular with fiction writers because it allows them to give the reader information that the character would be unlikely to provide—such as a description of his or her own appearance. (“I have beautiful, shiny black hair and big brown eyes with long lashes” sounds a little strange unless the character is supposed to be conceited.)
When you read a story told from the first-person or the third-person limited point of view, you share the thoughts and feelings of a single character and know only what he or she knows. Most writers of fiction published today tell their stories from the point of view of one character to help make the stories realistic. After all, we each go through life seeing things from only one person’s point of view—our own.
A Writer on Point of View
“I sold my first story when I was eighteen, to a science fiction magazine, and I just kept
on writing and publishing science fiction. I didn’t realize until later that when I was writing
these first-person narratives of aliens, I was really writing about myself.”—Laurence Yep, author of “We Are All One”
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