Point of View: Through Whose Eyes?

by John Leggett

When you were little, you probably imagined at one time or another that there was something terrifying under your bed. Did it ever occur to you that something might find you just as terrifying? As the saying goes, “It all depends on your point of view.” When you’re telling a story, you look at things one way—your way. When someone else tells the story, he or she will put a slightly different spin on the same events.

Novels and short stories are also told from a particular point of view, or vantage point. When you’re reading, you should ask, “Who is the narrator?” “Can I rely on this narrator to tell the truth?” and “What is the narrator’s relationship to the meaning of the story?”

The Big Three

The three most common points of view are the omniscient, the first person, and the third-person limited.

The omniscient point of view is the all-knowing point of view. (In Latin, omnis means “all,” and sciens means “knowing.”) You can think of an omniscient narrator as being above the action, looking down on it like a god. This narrator can tell you everything about all the characters, even their most private thoughts.

Once upon a time there lived a princess who would have been perfectly happy except for one thing: In a moment of weakness, she had promised to marry a frog. Her father felt sorry for her, but he insisted that she keep her word. (In fact, he was a little nervous—he’d never met a talking frog before.) “After all, a promise is a promise,” agreed her mother, who thought the frog was better looking than the princess’s last boyfriend. Little did any of the royal family know who the frog really was.

A story can also be told by one of the characters. In this viewpoint the character speaks as “I.” We call this the first-person point of view. (I is the first-person pronoun.) In this point of view, we know only what this one character can tell us. Sometimes this kind of narrator isn’t very reliable.

I couldn’t believe that my parents were actually going to make me marry a slimy, ugly, bulgy-eyed frog! They didn’t feel sorry for me at all! All they cared about was a stupid promise I never thought I’d have to keep.

Often a story is seen through the eyes of one character, but the character is not telling the story as “I.” This is called the third-person-limited point of view. In this point of view, a narrator zooms in on the thoughts and feelings of just one character in the story. This point of view helps us share that character’s reactions to the story’s events.

The princess tried desperately to get out of her promise. “It was all my parents’ fault,” she thought. They were so unfair. But she had a nagging feeling that she had only herself to blame—and the frog. “I wonder if the royal chef knows how to cook frogs’ legs?” she said to herself.

Point of view is very important in storytelling, and writers love to experiment with it. Someone who wants to tell the frog-and-princess story from a really unusual point of view might choose to let the frog tell it.

PRACTICE
Write three groups of sentences about a situation that is frightening for two different individuals, such as a boy and a monster under his bed.
• / In the first group of sentences, write as the omniscient narrator. As the omniscient narrator you might want to let your reader know how this unusual situation came about and give some hints about how it will end.
• / In the second group of sentences, write from the first-person point of view of the monster. Now you will write as “I.”
• / In the third group of sentences, take the third-person-limited point of view. This is the hardest. In this point of view, you are going to zoom in and focus on just one character.
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