POINT of VIEW

POINT of VIEW

From whose perspective...?

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1st Person POVI MeMy WeOur

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First person Narrator

• Uses “I”• Story is told

from a main character’s POV

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First person Narrator

Benefits: • Readers see events from the

perspective of an important character

• Readers often understand the main character better

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First person Narrator

Disadvantage: • The narrator may be

unreliable—insane, naïve, deceptive, narrow minded etc...

• Readers see only one perspective

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“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.  In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them.”                    

J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

First person Narrator

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“You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but it ain’t no matter.  That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain and he told the truth, mainly.  There was things he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.  That is nothing.  I never seen anybody but lied one time or another...”

--Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens),

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1881)

First person Narrator

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True--nervous--very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses--not destroyed--not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily--how calmly I can tell you the whole story.

   --Edgar Allan Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1850)

First person Narrator

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There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam.

--F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

First person Narrator

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2nd Person POVYouYoursYourYourself

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• A second-person POV is rare

• Uses “you” and presents commands

2nd Person POV

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Often the narrator is speaking to him/herself

2nd Person POV

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“Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry; don't walk barehead in the hot sun; cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweet oil; soak your little cloths right after you take them off; when buying cotton to make yourself a nice blouse, be sure that it doesn't have gum on it, because that way it won't hold up well after a wash; soak salt fish overnight before you cook it;”

--Jamaica Kincaid, “Girl”

2nd Person POV

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You are not the kind of guy who would be 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.

You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge. All might come clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder.

Then again, it might not.

--Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City (1984)

2nd Person POV

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3rd Person POV Omniscient Limited Omniscient Objective

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OmniscientAll knowing…the narrator can see into the minds of all characters

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Omniscient:  • godlike narrator; • can enter character's

minds • knows everything that is

going on, past, present, and future.

• May be a narrator outside the text

3rd Person POV: Omniscient

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Advantage:  • very natural

technique• author is, after all,

omniscient regarding his work.

3rd Person POV: Omniscient

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Disadvantage:• not lifelike;

• narrator knows and tells all;

• is truly a convention of literature and can feel artificial

3rd Person POV: Omniscient

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A poor man had twelve children and worked night and day just to get enough bread for them to eat. 

Now when the thirteenth came into the world, he did not know what to do and in his misery ran out onto the great highway to ask the first person he met to be godfather. 

The first to come along was God, and he already knew what it was that weighed on the man’s mind and said, “Poor man, I pity you.  I will hold your child at the font and I will look after it and make it happy upon earth.”

--Jakob & Wilhelm Grimm, “Godfather Death” (1812)

3rd Person POV: Omniscient

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With sudden and desperate tenderness, she threw her arms around him, and pressed his head against her bosom; little caring though his cheek rested on the scarlet letter. He would have released himself, but strove in vain to do so.

Hester would not set him free, lest he should look her sternly in the face…the frown of this pale, weak, sinful, and sorrow-stricken man was what Hester could not bear, and live!  

 “Wilt thou yet forgive me?” she repeated, over and over again. “Wilt thou not frown? Wilt thou forgive?”  

 “I do forgive you, Hester,” replied the minister, at length, with a deep utterance out of an abyss of sadness, but no anger.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850)

3rd Person POV: Omniscient

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Limited OmniscientNarrator can see into ONE

character’s mind.

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All characters have thought privacy except ONE.

3rd Person POV: Limited Omniscient

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Gives the impression that we are very close to the mind of that ONE character, though viewing it from a distance.

3rd Person POV: Limited Omniscient

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Sometimes this narrator can be too focused or may impose his/her own opinions with no grounds.

3rd Person POV: Limited Omniscient

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The girl he loved was shy and quick and the smallest in the class, and usually she said nothing, but one day she opened her mouth and roared, and when the teacher--it was French class--asked her what she was doing, she said, in French, I am a lion, and he wanted to smell her breath and put his hand against the rumblings in her throat.

--Elizabeth Graver, “The Boy Who Fell Forty Feet” (1993)

3rd Person POV: Limited Omniscient

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Although she had been around them her whole life, it was when she reached thirty-five that holding babies seemed to make her nervous.

“Andrienne, would you like to hold the baby?  Would you mind?” 

Always these words from a woman her age looking kind and beseeching--and Andrienne would force herself to breathe deep. 

   --Lorrie Moore, “Terrific Mother” (1992)

3rd Person POV: Limited Omniscient

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Goodman Brown felt himself justified in making more haste on his present evil purpose. He had taken a dreary road, darkened by all the gloomiest trees of the forest, which barely stood aside to let the narrow path creep through, and closed immediately behind.

It was all as lonely as could be; and there is this peculiarity in such a solitude, that the traveler knows not who may be concealed by the innumerable trunks and the thick boughs overhead; so that with lonely footsteps he may yet be passing through an unseen multitude.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Young Goodman Brown”

3rd Person POV: Limited Omniscient

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3rd Person POV: Objective Narrator only describes and

does not enter characters’ thoughts.

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Like a video camera, the narrator reports what happens and what the characters are saying.

3rd Person POV: Objective

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The narrator adds no comment about how the characters are feeling.

3rd Person POV: Objective

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The narrator offers no comment on the mood of the setting—no mention of awkwardness, ease, tension etc...

3rd Person POV: Objective

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The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green.  The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o’clock; in some towns there were so many people that the lottery took two days and had to be started on June 26th, but in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took less than two hours, so it could begin at ten o’clock in the morning and still be through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner.

      --Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery” (1948)

3rd Person POV: Objective

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”You should have killed yourself last week," he said to the deaf man. The old man motioned with his finger. "A little more," he said. The waiter poured on into the glass so that the brandy slopped over and ran down the stem

into the top saucer of the pile. "Thank you," the old man said. The waiter took the bottle back inside the cafe. He sat down at

the table with his colleague again. "He's drunk now," he said.  "He's drunk every night."  "What did he want to kill himself for?"  "How should I know."  "How did he do it?"  "He hung himself with a rope."  "Who cut him down?"  "His niece."  "Why did they do it?"  "Fear for his soul." 

“A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” by Ernest Hemingway

3rd Person POV: Objective

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POINT of VIEWWho is telling the story?

End of presentation.