Viewpoint

An Element of Fiction

Viewpoint is a key Fictional Element. Through whose eyes are things seen? Through whose feelings are things felt? By whose tongue are tings told? These are all key decisions that the writer has to make, and then stick to. Yes, you can have several viewpoints, but one cardinal sin that a writer commits is to be unclear about who is seeing, feeling, talking at any given time.

Some writers, Thomas Pynchon comes to mind, deliberately confuse viewpoint — apparently for artistic reasons, but I am not one to really appreciate that. All things done by a writer is to serve the story, and confusing viewpoints confuses the story along with the reader.

That said, let’s see what writers and teachers say about Viewpoint (and there are a lot of views on the subject — pun intended).

“The use of point of view,” says Tom Jenks, “is to bring the reader into immediate and continuous contact with the heart of the story and sustain him there.”

William Sloane elaborates, “One of the principal techniques is the use of a character whom the reader adopts for his reading experience. In the best fiction and most of the time, the reader is identifying with one or another of the characters in the story. He is vicariously living the fictional life of that character. He is being the Ishmael of Moby Dick. He is being the narrator of Deliverance. He is not, be it noted, being either Herman Melville or James Dickey.

“This is a difficult notion for some writers. No adequate terms exists for this character the reader becomes. In his book The World of Fiction, Bernard DeVoto called this character ‘the means of perception.’ It makes little difference what he is called; whether one uses the term ‘point of view,’ ‘standpoint,’ ‘alter ego,’ or ‘reader identification,’ is not important. What is important is that this is the fiction writer’s most useful device for securing his reader’s participation. Experiencing a work of fiction through one of its characters is the all-absorbing, self-obliterating joy of reading. It is the core of the child’s experience.” [My Italics]

Ursula K. Le Guin warns, “A writer must be aware of, have a reason for, and be in control of all shifts of viewpoint character.

“You can change point of view, of course. It’s your God given right as an American fiction writer. All I’m saying is, you need to know that you’re doing it; some American fiction writers don’t. And you need to know when and how to do it, so that when you shift, you carry the reader effortlessly with you.

“Point of View, POV for short and when scribbled in the margins of manuscripts, is the technical term for describing who is telling the story and what their relation to the story is.

“In fiction, the ‘I’ narrator (or the third-person narrator) is not the author.”

Following here is an imagined exchange between Le Guin and John Gardner about the various points of view:

Le Guin: “First person … only what ‘I’ knows, feels, perceives, thinks, guesses, hopes, remembers, etc., can be told.”

John Gardner: “First person locks us in one character’s mind, locks us to one kind of diction throughout, locks out possibilities of going deeply into various characters’ minds, and so forth.”

Le Guin: “Limited third person … only what the viewpoint character knows, feels, perceives, thinks, guesses, hopes, remembers, etc., can be told.

“In ‘limited third’ you’re writing from inside your character. You can tell only what that single character perceives, feels, knows, remembers, guesses.”

Gardner: “Third person limited point of view, or third person subjective, has some of the same drawbacks [as first person] for a long piece of fiction. (This point of view is essentially the same as first person except that ‘I’ is changed to ‘she’ or ‘Helen’).”

Le Guin: “Involved author (‘omniscient author’) … the story is not told from within any single character. There may be numerous viewpoint characters, and the narrative voice may change at any time from one to another character within the story, or to a view, perception, analysis, or prediction that only the author could make.

“I don’t like the common term ‘omniscient author,’ because I hear a judgmental sneer in it. I think ‘authorial narration’ is the most neutral term, and ‘involved author’ the most exact.

“Involved author is the most openly, obviously manipulative of the points of view.”

Gardner: “The traditional third person omniscient point of view, in which the story is told by an unnamed narrator (a persona of the author) who can dip into the mind and thoughts of any character, though he focuses primarily on no more than two or three, gives the writer the greatest range and freedom.

“A related point of view is that of the essayist narrator, much like the traditional omniscient narrator except that he (or she) has a definite voice and definite opinions.”

Le Guin: “Detached Author (‘fly on the wall,’ ‘camera eye,’ ‘objective narrator’) … The author never enters a character’s mind. People and places may be exactly described but values and judgments can be implied only indirectly … it is the most covertly manipulative of the points of view.

“Observer-Narrator, Using the First Person. The narrator is one of the characters, but not the principal character — present, but not a major character in the events. The difference from first-person narration is that the story is not about the narrator. It’s a story the narrator witnessed and wants to tell us.

“Observer-Narrator, Using the Third Person. This point of view is limited to fiction. The tactic is much the same as [using the first person]. The viewpoint character is a limited third-person narrator who witnesses the events.”

Gardner: “The choice of point of view will largely determine all other choices with regard to style — vulgar, colloquial, or formal diction, the length and characteristic speed of sentences, and so on.

“What the writer must consider, obviously, is the extent to which point of view, and all that follows from it, comments on the characters, actions and ideas.

“He must learn to step outside himself, see and feel things from every human — and inhuman — point of view. He must be able to report, with convincing precision, how the world looks to a child, a young woman, an elderly murderer, or the governor of Utah. He must learn, by staring intently into the dream he dreams over his typewriter, to distinguish the subtlest differences between the speech and feeling of his various characters, himself as impartial and detached as God, giving all human beings their due and acknowledging their frailties. Insofar as he pretends not to private vision but to omniscience, he cannot, as a rule, love some of his characters and despise others.

“Once one has recognized that the novelist ought to be able to play advocate for all kinds of human beings, see through their eyes, feel with their nerves, accept their stupidest settled opinions as self-evident facts (for them), one simply begins to do it; and doing it again and again — carefully rereading, reconsidering, revising — one gets good at it.

“What one has to get, one way or another, is insight — not just knowledge — into personalities not visibly like one’s own. What one needs is not the facts but the ‘feel’ of the person not oneself.”

Here’s what John Fowles has to say, “Whichever person I start a novel in, I very soon begin feeling its restrictions, and remembering the liberties of the other. I think I’m settling towards the third now. The omnipotent power of gravity in the novel form is realism. I resist it less and less.”

Flannery O’Connor muses, “The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.

“Point of view runs me crazy when I think about it but I believe that when you are writing well, you don’t think about it. I seldom think about it when I am writing a short story, but in the novel it gets to be a considerable worry.

“Point of view runs me nuts. If you violate the point of view, you destroy the sense of reality and louse yourself up generally.”

Says Virginia Woolf, “Yesterday morning I made another start on The Moths, but that won’t be its title; and several problems cry out at once to be solved. Who thinks it? And am I outside the thinker? One wants some device which is not a trick.”

Back to Fowles, “I find the first person more natural. I never think of writing a book in the third person, although The Ebony Tower and The French Lieutenant’s Woman are both third-person books. It usually just turns out that way after having been in the first person originally. I never feel quite at home as the omniscient narrator.”

Erich Auerbach, referring to a passage written by Petronius, “Inasmuch as the guest describes a company to which he himself belongs both by inner convictions and outward circumstances, the viewpoint is transferred to a point within the picture, the picture thus gains in depth, and the light which illuminates it seems to come from within it.”

Here is William Sloane’s advice, “The selection of the narrative approach or means of perception is one of the first things a fiction writer must do if he wants to be read. His selection should be a conscious or accurate one, and it must be made scene by scene, chapter by chapter, or book by book. Thereafter, he must shape his entire narration in terms of that decision. This point cannot be ignored. To ignore it is to forget the reader. The reader must always understand on any page in any sentence at any word — at any single word — the nature of his relationship to the story.

“More fiction fails because the author has not had the discipline and the ingenuity to provide and sustain a means of perception than for any other single reason. That is an editorial opinion, not a statistic.”

How Madison Smartt Bell puts it, “Where’s the camera?”

As for Philip Gerard, “Third person is emotionally cooler than first person.

“First person — the I narrator, with access only to the narrator’s interior world and the exterior world only as perceived by that narrator.

“Third-person omniscient — the godlike ‘all knowing’ narrator, with access to the interior lives of all the principal and supporting characters and the whole universe of time and space.

“Third-person limited or assigned — the narrator with access to only one viewpoint character’s thoughts and feelings, externally limited in scope to that character’s world.

“But in fact point of view is slipperier than such a technical catalogue indicates — more of a continuum than a series of discrete perspectives. The above list is only a starting point for the maturing writer.

“Writers workshops tend to become obsessive about point of view, citing ‘violations’ as if the writer had run a red light or been caught speeding, as if a perfectly maintained point of view somehow carries its own aesthetic value. But it is only a piece of technique, part of the apparatus of storytelling — a means, not an end in itself.

“The comprehensive first-person narrator’s insights may seem almost omniscient, may even strain credulity, but credulity never quire breaks, and they remain the narrator’s, not the authors.”

Let me add here that the element of Viewpoint is so important that many a manual on the craft are dedicated to the subject. You could do worse than tracking down a good book on this element and read it cover to cover.

© Wolfstuff