Point of VIew. Voice and focalisation

 

The things expressed in the text are seen from a certain perspective in terms of their relation to the events and characters. The key items are the following: who it is who tells the story, from what perspective, with what sense ofdistance or closeness, with what possibilities of knowledge, and with what interest.

The point of view in a piece of writing is the perspective from which a story is told: the first-person point of view – the narrator participates in the action and uses the pronoun “I” to refer to himself/herself; the second-person point of view – the narrator uses the imperative mood and the pronoun “you” to refer to the reader; the third-person point of view – the narrator does not participate in the action, instead, the action is described as happening to some he, she, or it.

In fiction, the first-person point of view can be very powerful. In this kind of narrative everything is presented through the narrator’s eyes. This means that the only access we have to other characters is through the narrator’s perception of them. It also means that you should be aware that the narrators’ own characters will affect their judgement. The use of a first-person narrator can create a range of effects, including tension, irony and humour. The speaker is not the writer, but rather a character created by the writer’s imagination. The gap between the narrator’s awareness and the reader’s awareness is a major factor in many novels. Some writers choose to write in the first person to let readers know that the personal experiences or ideas expressed are one’s own. Everything is seen from the perspective of the character, who is also the narrator. By inhabiting the world of one character fully, a writer creates intimate and moving portrayals of individuals and their stories. In the following passage, the narrator is Lemuel Gulliver, a ship’s surgeon who describes his adventures in an imaginary land.

The Queen, giving great allowance for my defectiveness in speaking, was however surprised at so much wit and good sense in so diminutive an animal. She took me in her own hand, and carried me to the King, who was then retired to his cabinet.

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1735)

The first-person narrator is involved in the world of the story. The extent and variation of the temporal and cognitive distance between the narrating I and the experiencing I determines the quality of the narrative. Robinson (Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719)) forms the centre of his own story (I-as-protagonist). This leads to a greater illusion of reality, as well as the sense of immediacy and credibility. The first major English woman author Aphra Behn uses the first person as a minor character and observer (I-as-witness) in her exotic narrative Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave (1688). She comments on the natural limits of awareness without direct access to others’ feelings and thoughts: “I was myself an eye-witness to a great part of what you will find here set down; and what I could not be witness of, I receiv’d from the mouth of the chief actor in this history, the hero himself”.

In addition, adventure novels (R.L. Stevenson, Treasure Island (1883)), diaries, letters, essays, memoirs and autobiographies as well as epistolary novels (S. Richardson’s Pamela (1740), Clarissa (1749), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897)) offer models of writing in the first person, which are connected to the central position of the individual.

Using the second-person point of view, a writer often tries to elicit a personal response or action from individuals in the audience. You can find the example in the extract from Tony Parsons’ Man and Boy (1999): “ By thirty you have finally realized that you are not going to live forever, of course. But surely that should only make the laughing, latte-drinking present taste even sweeter? You shouldn’t let your inevitable death put a damper on things. Don’t let the long, slow slide to the grave get in the way of good time”.

Writers use the third-person point of view when the emphasis is on the message rather than on the message-giver. When writing fiction from the third-person perspective, one must decide whether to use a limited or omniscient point of view. In writing from the third-person limited point of view, the narrator speaks from the perspective of one character. For example, the point of view in the following passage is limited to the perspective of Louise Mallard as she anticipates the news that her husband has been killed in a train accident.

There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it she did not know; it was too subtle and allusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the colour that filled the air.

Kate Chopin, The Story of an Hour (1894)

In writing from the third-person omniscient point of view, the narrator is able to reveal the unspoken thoughts of all the characters. Omniscient means “knowing everything”. Being omnipresent and omniscient, the authorial narrator can see into the future, read various characters’ thoughts and even their subconscious. An omniscient narrator will have a distinctive tone and voice, and an attitude to the characters and events described. Sometimes the narrator’s opinion will be made clear in a direct address to the reader; sometimes it will emerge through the tone of the narrative. Omniscient narrators can move backwards and forwards in time, from one setting to another, can reveal what characters are thinking and feeling. In the following passage from The Great Fire of London (1982), Peter Ackroyd describes family relationships entering the minds of both spouses: “ Laetitia Spender sometimes thought that, if she closed her eyes for long enough, she might cease to exist, she might discover her vanishing point. Her reality, she was convinced, was known only to herself; for everyone else she was Spenser Spender’s wife, very attractive, really, hadn’t she been a model once? She hated being called “Lettuce” or even Letty: it confirmed her status merely as an object. But somehow the names had stuck – perhaps she did resemble an abbreviation or a vegetable. At these moments she would shut her eyes and try to imagine herself dead; or she would argue bitterly with Spenser over small things – over the question, for example, of how many tea-bags should be placed in a tea pot. She took no satisfaction in provoking such arguments, but there was nothing else for her to win.