Department of English

Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University

Point of View

Every story has a narrator, who presents the action from a particular, identifiable point of view. The narrator may be a character in the story who speaks in the first person. More often, the narrator views the action from a vantage point outside the story, speaking in the third person. When such a narrator seems to know everything about all the characters, he may be called omniscient. Sometimes a narrator will seem to know everything about only one character, or perhaps two, offering a kind of selective omniscience. The narrator allows us to feel the impact of event on certain characters as if we had complete access to their minds.

Reaske, Christopher R. Mirrors: An Introduction to Literature. 3rd ed. New York: Harper and Row, 1988, 161.

In literature, point of view refers to who narrates a story and how much that narrator knows. In a story told from the first-person point of view, the writer chooses to have a character within the story narrate it, using the first-person pronouns I and me. This method of storytelling lets the reader see and know only what that character, the narrator, sees and knows.

Literature and Language: English and World Literature. Evanston, Illinois: McDougal, Little & Co., 1992, 153.

When planning a story, an author usually chooses between first-person point of view, in which the narrator is a character, and third-person point of view, in which the narrator is not a story participant.

Third-person narrators can be classified as omniscient or limited, depending on how much they know. In the omniscient point of view, the narrator is all-knowing and so can describe every character's thoughts. By contrast, a narrator in a third-person limited point of view possesses limited knowledge, often confined to one or two characters.

Literature and Language: English and World Literature. Evanston, Illinois: McDougal, Little & Co., 1992, 615. 

Vocabulary

narrative point of view

viewpoint

perspective

narrator (reliable, unreliable/fallible)

points of view

• omniscient

• limited omniscient (major, minor character)

• first person (major, minor character; singular, plural)

• second person 

• third person

• multiple person

• objective, dramatic

focal character

inside and outside the character's mind

author

spectator, observer

stream of consciousness

advantage(s)

limitation(s)

function(s)

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Last updated December 17, 2008