Point of view (literature)
Point of view in literature refers to the narrative perspective through which a story is communicated, influencing how readers engage with the text. It encompasses various forms, including first-person, where the narrator is a participant in the story, and second-person, which directly addresses the reader as "you." Third-person perspectives can be omniscient, revealing thoughts and feelings of multiple characters, or limited, focusing on a single character's viewpoint. This choice of perspective shapes the narrative's emotional depth and can manipulate reader responses. Historically significant, point of view has evolved through literary forms such as the epistolary novel, allowing for diverse perspectives in storytelling. In modern media, including film and video games, point of view is crucial for creating emotional connections, as it guides audience perception and understanding. By strategically presenting information and utilizing techniques like visual rhythm, creators can enhance the story’s impact, ultimately shaping how experiences are interpreted.
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Point of view (literature)
The narrative point of view or narrative mode is the chosen method used to communicate a story. Point of view is employed in all kinds of communications designed to engage readers, listeners, or viewers. Understanding how point of view rhetorically convinces is relevant in many areas of communications. Writers choose the point of view that stylistically best fits the narrative and strive to create a unique voice that will establish a relationship with readers. The narrative voice establishes continuity in the way the plot is communicated and can be that of the author, a fictional entity, or a combination of figures.
Background
The narrative point of view is found in all forms of storytelling and dates back to ancient times. In literature, “person” is used to identify the story’s point of view, allowing the audience to perceive perspective and bias. First-person point of view is told from the perspective of a narrator, typically a participant in the story, who refers to himself or herself as “I,” while in second-person point of view, the narrator is referred to as “you.” When a third-person point of view is in use, the narrator does not participate in the action as a character but conveys what one or more characters feel and think.
Point of view, in its various guises, reveals the narrator’s position with regard to the story that is unfolding; the author can also create a mosaic of multiple points of view. When an author tells what is happening in a story without presenting anything more than what can be inferred from the action and dialogue, even refraining from describing what the characters are thinking, the point of view is referred to as objective.
The narrative point of view can be that of a participant in the story’s plot or a nonparticipant omniscient or semiomniscient entity that simply relates a story. Another historically popular means to convey point of view is the third-person omniscient voice, in which the narrator presents an overarching point of view and at times reveals information that the characters do not and cannot know. The third-person limited point of view allows the narrator to presents the thoughts, feelings, and opinions of one character or a select few characters, and what is communicated is only what those characters perceive and know.
Historically, female authors in particular have sometimes employed covert means for revealing points of view; for instance, the instructional dialogue became a means for women to recite stories without a defined narrator. The epistolary novel, which compiles a series of fictional letters or documents and has been composed by both women and men throughout its history, reveals a story through multiple points of view. English dramatist and political operative Aphra Behn (1640–89) used letters as a literary device in Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684–87) to allow the story to change perspectives and introduce romantic intrigues. Authors continued to create epistolary fiction during the eighteenth century, and Mary Shelley (1797–1851) used this no-narrator device to great effect in Frankenstein (1818).
Impact
Point of view is a rhetorical device that provides meaning and context to a story; it can be used to manipulate stories to achieve an emotional reaction from the reader. With the first-person point of view, the narrator participates in the action and conveys what may not be the objective truth. Media producers use point of view to elicit responses from audiences, participants/players, and consumers who tap into a collective consciousness to interpret point of view quickly every time they encounter a work. Advertisers, like writers and other media producers, apply psychology and the need for psychological closure to engage the audience’s ability to take certain minimal clues and fill in information to arrive at manageable conclusions, which in turn motivates certain actions.
In film or television storytelling, psychological closure is often mandatory in order to tell a story in an allotted amount of time. Storytellers create rhetoric that offers visual rhythm, combining easily recognizable elements with continuity in order to lead the audience to certain literal, figurative, and visual conclusions. Therefore, story details are often purposely omitted so that point of view becomes more apparent. Point of view is visually presented by what the camera captures.
Video-game designers create an immediate first-person point of view in shooting, racing, and flight-simulation games by structuring two-dimensional fields with graphic interplay of dynamic vectors so that players are drawn into the story. When a plotline unfolds, the vector changes continually. Three-dimensional graphics in games allow players to alternate between first- and third-person perspectives in order to exercise spatial and reflex skills within simulations. As the player of a first-person video game is typically a participant in the story the game is telling, the game may conceal information or provide misleading clues, acting as an unreliable narrator of sorts, in order to make later plot or character revelations more effective.
Point of view can be easily manipulated through the editing of words or images. Humans tend to want to perceive life as a collection of simple, predictable patterns rather than random incidents linked together, and people often perceive events as connected, and providing psychological closure, even when they apparently do not belong together. In film, television, and video games, sound has an enormous impact on how the audience will perceive a work’s point of view, as it supplies additional information that contributes to psychological closure.
Bibliography
Gardner, Jared. Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2012. Print.
Page, Ruth, and Bronwen Thomas. New Narratives: Stories and Storytelling in the Digital Age. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2011. Print.
Punday, Daniel. Writing at the Limit: The Novel in the New Media Ecology. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2012. Print.
Rasley, Alicia. The Power of Point of View: Make Your Story Come to Life. Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest, 2008. Print.
Rodgers, Shelly, and Esther Thorson. Advertising Theory. New York: Routledge, 2012. Print.
Roth, Wolff-Michael. First-Person Methods: Toward an Empirical Phenomenology of Experience. Rotterdam: SensePublishers, 2012. Print.
Stanzel, Franz Karl. A Theory of Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. Print.
Westbrook, Deeanne. Speaking of Gods in Figure and Narrative. New York: Palgrave, 2011. Print.