If you've ever had grammar, and more importantly, if you've ever had to conjugate verbs in something like spanish, then you already have the basics down for point of view. There are three basic points of view. First person, which uses the word 'I'. Third person, which uses 'he' and 'she' and second person, which is used in a French novel called L'HOMME QUI DORT or THE MAN WHO SLEEPS and uses 'you'. Actually I've never read L'HOMME QUI DORT because when I was in graduate school I could read about five pages of French an hour and now that I have been out of graduate school for almost fifteen years I read nothing in French more complicated than menus. Menus, by the way, can be in second person p.o.v. as in, 'You'll love our heart-healthy choices.'Return to Unreliable narrators.(Someone told my Jay McInnerny's novel BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY uses second person p.o.v., but I've never read that either.) (But if you can use second person p.o.v. fluently you will be bored out of your mind reading this anyway. And I'm not going to talk about second person p.o.v. anymore.)
First person p.o.v. works like this:
It was there when I woke up, I swear. The feeling.Notice all the places where Jonathan uses 'I'? The character in the story is not Jonathan Lethem, the writer, but the convention is that we pretend that the narrator is telling the story.It was two weeks after I'd quit my last case, working for Maynard Stanhunt. The feeling was there before I tuned in the musical interpretation of the news on my bedside radio, but it was the musical news that confirmed it: I was about to work again. I would get a case. Violins were stabbing their way through the choral arrangement in a series of ascending runs that never resolved, never peaked, just faded away and were replaced by more of the same. It was the sound of trouble, something private and tragic; suicide, or murder, rather than a political event.
(The opening of GUN WITH OCCASIONAL MUSIC by Jonathan Lethem, copyright 1994.)
Third person p.o.v. works like this:
Chevette never stole things, or anyway not from other people, and definitely not when she was pulling tags. Except this one bad Monday when she took this total asshole's sunglasses, but that was just because she didn't like him.Chevette isn't telling the story, unless, like Bob Dole, she tends to refer to herself in third person a lot.(From VIRTUAL LIGHT by William Gibson, copyright 1993, Bantum Spectra paperback edition, p. 41.)
Third person p.o.v. is a little trickier. There's third person limited and third person omniscient. Third person limited is when the writer picks a character, for example, the character of Chevette in VIRTUAL LIGHT, and tells the reader the story from the p.o.v. of what Chevette experiences and thinks. In the story where the p.o.v. is from Chevette, the writer never tells us what anyone else is thinking or feeling. So the writer can't say, for example, that the asshole was looking at Chevette and thinking what a fine little piece she was, all strong from pumping her bicycle up and down the hills of San Francisco delivering packages, not unless Chevette is a mindreader and she knows what the asshole is thinking. Mindreaders are pretty much out of style these days.
Now the writer might chose to have another section marrated by someone entirely different, say a security guard named Rydell. (Which in fact, Gibson does.) As long as p.o.v. doesn't shift in the same scene it works. Why this is so I can't really say. Some people say its too jarring for the reader but I suspect its just something we're all used to.
Omniscient p.o.v. is a narrator that is in everyone's head.
Smalltown had about 2000 people in it, and as a result, knew who all the crazies were and tended not to elect them to the school board. This meant that the Smalltown Board of Education was not likely to issue edicts about the impropriety of teaching evolution without teaching creation science or ban anything that might be construed to promote homosexuality or sexually perverse practices without realizing that the senior class was reading Shakespeare's TWELTH NIGHT which had crossdressing in it since one of the characters pretends to be a boy. Mrs. Venstermeyer would have supported a measure against promoting homosexuality or sexually perverse practices but she was not the kind of woman to think that perverse practices were rampant in Smalltown. Mr. Stompard, her neighbor, did think perverse practices were rampant in Smalltown and believed that the grafitti on the retaining wall near the high school indicated Satanism. The grafitti on the wall was a bad attempt to copy the logo of a particularly popular brand of tennis shoes called 'Air-rides' but Mr. Stompard thought that the stylized 'A' looked like a goats head. He was careful not to explain this to people because there had been a pretty severe reaction to his theory that there was a white supremicist moving brewing in town. Nonetheless he had failed to be elected to the school board.Needless to say, no character knows what goes in in Mrs. Venstermeyer and Mr. Stompard's heads, unless the story has telepaths in it. More likely, the story is in omniscient p.o.v. which allows the story to dip into people's heads as necessary.This is a tough p.o.v. to carry off, by the way. I can't do it for much longer than the paragraph about Smalltown. (With apologies to Jim Macdonald, from whom I stole the idea.)