Point of view
Is the angle or vantage point from which
events are presented.
Kinds of point of view
• First person
• Third person: omniscient
limited omniscient
objective
FIRST PERSON NARRATOR (I
OR WE)
• Major character telling his or her own story
• Minor character as witness or
nonparticipant
THIRD PERSON NARRATOR
• OMNISCIENT-ABLE TO MOVE AT WILL
FROM CHARACTER TO CHARACTER AND
COMMENT ABOUT THEM
• LIMITED OMNISCIENT-RESTRICTS FOCUS
TO A SINGLE CHARACTER
• OBJECTIVE (DRAMATIC)-SIMPLY REPORTS
THE DIALOGUE AND THE ACTIONS OF
CHARACTERS.
theme
• Is its controlling idea or its central insight
• Not all stories have theme
• Exists in all interpretive fiction but only in
some escape fiction
Principles of identifying theme
• Theme must be expressible in the form of a statement with
subject and predicate
• The theme must be stated as a generalization about life
• We must be careful not to make the generalization larger
than is justified bye the terms of the story.
• Theme is the central and unifying concept
• There is no one way of stating the theme of a story.
• We should avoid any statement that reduces the theme to
some familiar