Point of View
(Who’s telling this story?)
“To identify the narrator, describing
any part he or she plays in the events
and any limits placed upon his
knowledge, is to identify the story’s
point of view.”
Fiction = Story
—  When you read a story, you enter a world created
by the author
—  this world has its own logic; therefore, it cannot be
judged by the rules and logic of our world (e.g., you
could have a 42-shooter in fiction)
Narrator
—  Every story is told BY someone; that someone is
the narrator
—  we need to know what kind of person our narrator
is (i.e., is s/he a character in the story? Does s/
he seem to know everything that is going on? Can
we trust her/him?)
NOTE:
—  In order to fully understand a story, we must
determine WHO is telling it (i.e., what kind of
narrator do we have?)
—  the same story told by two different narrators
would, in the end, be entirely different
Narrator a Participant (Writing
in the First Person)
e.g. “How I Met My Husband,” We Are All Completely
Beside Ourselves
—  a major character
—  a minor character
Narrator a Nonparticipant
(Writing in the Third Person)
e.g. “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”
—  all-knowing (seeing into any of the characters) =
“omniscient”
—  seeing into one major character
—  seeing into one minor character
—  objective (not seeing into any characters)
Editorial omniscience:
❂  an all-seeing narrator goes beyond reporting the
thoughts of his or her characters and also offers
critical judgment or commentary, thereby making
his own thoughts or philosophies clear.
Impartial omniscience:
❂  all-seeing narrator presents the thoughts
and actions of the characters without
judging them or commenting on them.
Limited (selective) omniscience:
—  (e.g. “The Garden Party”)
—  Also called limited third-person point of view.
The narrator sees into the minds of some but
not all of the characters, usually through the
eyes of the protagonist or other major character.
For the author, this can be a compromise
between the immediacy of the first-person point
of view and the mobility of the third person.
Innocent/Naïve narrator
❂  narrator is a character in the story and fails to
understand all of the implications of the story he
or she is telling; often this narrator is a child or a
childlike adult.
Unreliable narrator
e.g. “The Tell-Tale Heart”; “Why I Live at the
P.O.”
—  narrator who – intentionally or not – relates
events in a subjective or distorted manner.
The author will generally provide some
indication early on in such stories to tell us
that we are not to trust the narrator
completely.
Questions about the narrator
—  For a series of questions to ask yourself in order
to understand your narrator more clearly, see
Study Guides and Strategies: Reading Fiction: http://www.studygs.net/fiction.htm. —  The site also has a short quiz you can take to
see if you can recognize what type of narrator
you've encountered.