Prof. Robert Collins
ENGL 262G—The Art of Literature
Point of View vs. Perspective
Point of View/Perspective Tip Sheet
In everyday language the phrase “point of view” is interchangeable with the word “perspective.”
There seems to be no real difference between saying “I wish you could see things from my point of view” and saying “I wish you could see things from my perspective.” For our purposes, however, we’ll be using them to describe two related but different aspects of a story. We’ll call this a working
distinction, which means that we’ll only use it so long as it’s useful for analyzing whatever we happen to be talking about.
We’ll use the phrase point of view, then, to talk about what kind of narrator a story has, and in particular to distinguish between stories in which the narrator is a character within the plot and stories in which the narrator is not.
Perspective, on the other hand, will tell us what kind of information the narrator has access to and what the narrator’s worldview is.
Point of View
 1st-Person Narrator — This is a narrator who says “I,” and is almost always a character in the story. A first-person narrator is usually the protagonist – as in
“Araby” and “The Lightning-Rod Man” – but not always, as in Arthur Conan
Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. Because this narrator is within the story, he or she can (and probably will) have an effect on the plot.
 2nd-Person Narrator — This is a rare and strange point of view. Stories in this point of view are told to you and about you: “You turn the corner onto your block and see a strange car parked in front of your house,” or something like that. Stories told from this perspective are almost universally failures, but Italo Calvino’s If on a
winter’s night a traveler and Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City are examples of novels told from this point of view that are considered successful. Early text-based computer games take this perspective: “You wake up in a dark cave. What will you do?” We won’t be reading any stories from this perspective this semester.
 3rd-Person Narrator — This is a narrator who does not say “I,” and probably doesn’t say “you”. They are not a character within the story, and so we presume that they do not have a direct effect on the plot. They can, however, have an effect on how we see the plot, since they are responsible for how it’s represented to us in language.
“The Lady with the Dog” and “The Rocking Horse Winner” are examples of stories with a third person narrator.

Perspective
 Subjective or Interior — This perspective has access to the inner states of characters within the story: what they think, feel, know, want, and so on. A firstperson narrator will probably be able to tell you this about at least him- or herself, but will sometimes be able to tell us about the inner states of other characters as well.
In these cases it’s safe to treat this as speculation: for example, the narrator could be wrong when he says that his ex-girlfriend really wants to get back together some day.
A third-person narrator might able to tell you everything about everybody in the story. We would call this narrator omniscient, which is a fancy way of saying “allknowing”. The narrator of “The Rocking Horse Winner” is of this kind. Some thirdperson narrators might only have access to some characters inner states. We call this narrator limited. The narrator of “The Lady with the Dog” is of this kind: we know what Gurov is thinking and feeling, but we don’t know the first thing about Anna
Sergeyevna’s inner states. What we called direct characterization earlier in the semester – when what characters want is directly revealed to us – requires an interior perspective.
 Objective — Inner states are completely closed off from this perspective: we only see what characters do and what they look like from the outside. It is quite difficult to write an effective story like this.
 Bias — We are likely to think of bias as a bad thing that we should eradicate, but I suspect that it’s unavoidable at the end of the day. Whether or not the narrator has an effect on the story itself, he or she can distort what we find important about the story in a few ways: o Focus — We can’t know every little detail about the plot as it unfolds, and so there must be some sort of selection process at work that determines what we’re told about and what we have imagine on our own: what color pants was Paul wearing in “The Rocking Horse Winner”? It is safe to assume that the things that we are told about are more important to the narrator than the things we are not told about. However, noticing what’s not in the story can be just as fruitful as noticing what is. o Word Choice — Many words have an evaluation built into them: imagine the difference between “influence,” “manipulate,” “persuade,” and
“convince.” These words can mean essentially the same thing, but I think we’ll all agree that to say that you were manipulated is to imply something slightly different than to say you were persuaded: your feeling about the person who manipulates you is different than your feeling about the person who persuades you. This is all to say that the words that the narrator chooses are important, and will reveal something about that narrator’s disposition, opinions, and biases.