Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

21.2 Point of view and narration
Unit 21 Narrative point of view
Section 5 Narrative

The term ’point of view’ in the discussion of prose fiction has been used in a variety of ways (see Fowler, 1986; Simpson, 1993, 2004). It can be used literally to refer to visual perspective - the spatial position and angle of vision from which a scene is presented. It can also be used, metaphorically, to designate the ideological framework and presuppositions of a text (e.g. ’the point of view of the emergent bourgeoisie’, or ’a male perspective’). Finally, it can be used as a term for describing and analysing distinctions between types of narration - the different types of relation of the teller to the tale in any narrative. It is this relationship - between point of view and narration - that will be examined in this unit.

The simplest distinction that we can make in discussing point of view is between two types of narration - a first person ’I-narration’ and a third person

’they-narration’. Thus, if we take a narrative event such as ’the end of a relationship’, the same event could be narrated in at least two ways:

She texted him that it was all over (third person).

Or:

I texted him that it was all over (first person).

The terminology, first person versus third person, is based upon the grammatical distinction between three persons. In describing the grammar of the personal pronoun system in English (I, you, he, she it, we, you, they), items that refer to, or include, the speaker (I, we) are termed ’first person’. Items that refer to the addressee (you) are termed ’second person’. Items that refer to anyone or anything other than the speaker and the addressee are termed ’third person’.

Given the options in the pronoun system, we might wonder if second person narration ever occurs. In fact, although it is extremely rare, some examples do exist - the best known being perhaps Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1981). The reason why second person narration is so rare relates to the ease with which both first person and third person reference can be restricted to figures in a narrative and the converse difficulty in making the second person refer only to a figure in the tale: the second person always somehow points to, or constructs for itself, an addressee. Thus:

You texted him that it was all over, sounds like a question to a co-conversationalist rather than a description of a narrative event. Accordingly, we will deal only with features of first versus third person narration.

21.2.1 First person narration

First person narration may be found in a wide range of novels otherwise different in style and period. Novels such as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847), Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1884), Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (1967) and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1983) are all told in the first person. Indeed, in the case of Robinson Crusoe, the very chapter headings emphasize the use of the first person: ’I Go to Sea’, ’I Am Very Ill and Frighted’, ’I Sow My Grain’, ’I Am Very Seldom Idle’. In this example, and in most of those listed above, the I-narrator is also the central protagonist of the tale, so that the person central to the action of the story is also telling it.

For example, the ’Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Sinner’ (which is the central narrative of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, framed before and after by ’The Editor’s Narrative’, also narrated in the first person) begins as follows:

My life has been a life of trouble and turmoil; of change and vicissitude; of anger and exultation; of sorrow and of vengeance. My sorrows have all been for a slighted gospel, and my vengeance has been wreaked on its adversaries. Therefore in the might of heaven I will sit down and write . . . I was born an outcast in the world, in which I was destined to act so conspicuous a part.

It concludes with the impending death of the sinner and a series of farewells:

Farewell, world, with all thy miseries; for comforts and joys hast thou none! Farewell, woman, whom I have despised and shunned; and man, whom I have hated; whom, nevertheless, I desire to leave in charity! And thou, sun, bright emblem of a brighter effulgence, I bid farewell to thee also! I do not now take my last look of thee, for to thy glorious orb shall a poor suicide’s last earthly look be raised. But, ah! Who is yon that I see approaching furiously - his stern face blackened with horrid despair! My hour is at hand. - Almighty God, what is this that I am about to do! The hour of repentance is past, and now my fate is inevitable - Amen, for ever! I will now seal up my little book, and conceal it; and cursed be he who trieth to alter or amend!

Thus, in the ’Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Sinner’ the sinner’s life is coterminous with the narrative, which is told by him in the first person as the very figure who acts ’so conspicuous a part’ in the tale.

First person narration, however, can be used in a quite different way where the story is told not by the central protagonist but by a subsidiary character. Indeed, the ’Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Sinner’ is framed - as we have said - by just such a first person narration, purportedly that of the editor and discoverer of the ’confessions’ narrative that the sinner had completed just before his death.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1922) is a well-known case of the tale being told through the first person narration of a subsidiary character. Although Nick, the narrator, tells the story in the first person, he remains on the margins of the main events, which involve the central figure - Jay Gatsby himself - whose story is thus told from some degree of narrative distance. Here, for instance, is Nick describing Gatsby and Daisy, whose reunion he has helped - almost unwittingly - to make possible:

As I went over to say goodbye I saw that the expression of bewilderment had come back into Gatsby’s face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as to the quality of his present happiness. Almost five years! There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams - not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghostly heart.

As I watched him he adjusted himself a little, visibly. His hand took hold of hers, and as she said something low in his ear he turned toward her with a rush of emotion. I think that voice held him most, with its fluctuating feverish warmth, because it couldn’t be overdreamed - that voice was a deathless song.

They had forgotten me, but Daisy glanced up and held out her hand; Gatsby didn’t know me at all. I looked once more at them and they looked back at me, remotely, possessed by intense life. Then I went out of the room and down the marble steps into the rain, leaving them there together.

Nick’s narration does contain some confident, almost poetic, assertions - usually about life: for instance, ’No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghostly heart’; or ’that voice was a deathless song’. However, it is also full of circumspect observation (’I saw that . . .’, ’As I watched him . . .’, ’I looked once more at them . . .’), where the truth of the events that are described is not certain: ’I saw that the expression of bewilderment had come back into Gatsby’s face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him’; or ’There must have been moments’; or ’and as she said something low in his ear he turned toward her with a rush of emotion’; or ’I think that voice held him most’. Indeed, the two deaths that separately constitute the spring of the tragedy and its denouement each happen, so to speak, ’off camera’ since Nick is present at neither event.

First person narration, therefore, usually has in-built restrictions, especially when told from the viewpoint of a minor character, though even a central character will be ignorant about some of the things happening around him or her. Whatever its restrictions, however, it projects the reader clearly inside the consciousness of someone in the story giving us the events from a defined observer’s position.

21.2.2 Third person narration

Third person narration, by contrast, can be used in such a way that we are not particularly aware of the role of the narrator, who remains outside the action of the tale. In such writing the narration seems to operate as a simple window on the events of the story; and, because the role of the narrator is carefully effaced, this mode of narration acquires a reputation for impersonal, but all- seeing, objectivity. The opening of William Goldings’s Lord of the Flies(1954) is of this type, in the way it introduces an unnamed boy, who is presented from the outside:

The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way towards the lagoon. Though he had taken off his school sweater and trailed it now from one hand, his grey shirt stuck to him and his hair was plastered to his forehead.

As third rather than first person narration this presents quite different opportunities for readers to align themselves with the story. ’The boy with fair hair’ is clearly presented to us at this moment as if observed from without. Indeed, it would be hard to re-cast any of this into first person from the boy’s perspective: for instance ’my hair was plastered to my forehead’ sounds odd precisely because the boy would simultaneously have to be the subjective agent of the narration and object of its scrutiny. He’d have to be looking at himself.

The opening passage of the novel continues (still in the third person) as follows:

All round him the long scar smashed into the jungle was a bath of heat. He was clambering heavily among the creepers and broken trunks when a bird, a vision of red and yellow, flashed upwards with a witch-like cry; and this cry was echoed by another.

Although the narration remains in the third person, the sensations described shift to being - in part at least - those of the boy. It could be the boy who feels the long scar in the jungle as a bath of heat and who sees the red and yellow of the bird and who hears its ’witch-like cry’. Indeed, these sentences do not sound as odd as the earlier part of the passage if transformed into the boy’s first person narration: for instance, ’All round me the long scar smashed into the jungle was a bath of heat’ reads quite appropriately.

In this respect, third person narration is potentially more flexible and enjoys a technical advantage over first person narration. First person narrators have to provide a warrant for knowing the details that they narrate. However, if the narrator is not defined and named, operating instead anonymously in the third person, the narrative does not have to provide a warrant for presenting everything and anything that is going on in the story, whether it is inside the mind of a character or not.

Moreover, it is important to recognize that there are contrasting possibilities within third person narration, which we may sum up in terms of the following oppositions:

INTERNAL versus EXTERNAL

RESTRICTED KNOWLEDGE versus UNRESTRICTED KNOWLEDGE

Internal/External: The example of third person narration given above from Lord of the Flies begins by observing characters and events from outside (externally). But third person narration may also provide access to the (internal) consciousness of characters by telling us how they think and feel. Much of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover(1928), for instance, despite its title, adopts Connie Chatterley’s perspective rather than that of her lover, Mellors. The following passage (despite its third person narration) is - with its emphasis on Connie’s feelings - fairly representative of the novel as a whole:

Now she came every day to the hens, they were the only things in the world that warmed her heart. Clifford’s protestations made her go cold from head to foot. Mrs Bolton’s voice made her go cold, and the sound of the business men who came. An occasional letter from Michaelis affected her with the same sense of chill. She felt she would surely die if it lasted much longer.

Yet it was spring, and the bluebells were coming in the wood, and the leaf-buds on the hazels were opening like the spatter of green rain. How terrible it was that it should be spring, and everything cold-hearted, cold- hearted. Only the hens, fluffed so wonderfully on the eggs, were warm with their hot, brooding female bodies! Connie felt herself living on the brink of fainting all the time.

Although this passage, like the rest of the novel, is consistently in the third person, it is nonetheless devoted primarily to the inner sensations of the person it describes. Indeed, rhetorically it is structured around a simple, basic opposition in Connie’s sensations between warmth and cold (equivalent to life and death). Significantly, it is difficult to read the penultimate sentence as the narrator’s comment. It makes most sense as a piece of free indirect thought (see Unit 22, Speech and narration) belonging in part at least to Connie herself. Third person narration, therefore, has the option of being internal or external, sometimes switching within the same text.

Restricted/Unrestricted: A second distinction may be made in third person narration between narration with no restrictions on the knowable (so-called ’omniscient narration’), and narration with restrictions on the knowable. Indeed, in third person narration we tend to assume that narration is omniscient unless there are indications to the contrary, usually in the foregrounding of a character who - though given to us in the third person - offers a position from which events can be known. Consider the following passage from Henry James’s short novel Daisy Miller (1879), in which the heroine is observed for us (by a subsidiary character - a young man named Winterbourne who is sympathetically attracted to Daisy) in conversation with an Italian companion (’her cavalier’, or gallant), named Giovanelli:

Winterbourne stood there: he had turned his eyes towards Daisy and her cavalier. They evidently saw no-one; they were too deeply occupied with each other. When they reached the low garden-wall they stood a moment looking off at the great flat-topped pine-clusters of the Villa Borghese; then Giovanelli seated himself familiarly upon the broad ledge of the wall. The western sun in the opposite sky sent out a brilliant shaft through a couple of cloud bars; whereupon Daisy’s companion took her parasol out of her hands and opened it. She came a little nearer and he held the parasol over her; then, still holding it, he let it rest upon her shoulder, so that both their heads were hidden from Winterbourne. This young man lingered a moment, then he began to walk. But he walked - not towards the couple with the parasol; towards the residence of his aunt, Mrs Costello.

In places this passage could be read as simple, omniscient, unrestricted third person. For instance, the following fragment, taken in isolation, seems to be from no one individual’s perspective:

The western sun in the opposite sky sent out a brilliant shaft through a couple of cloud bars; whereupon Daisy’s companion took her parasol out of her hands and opened it. She came a little nearer and he held the parasol over her.

However, placed in a larger context this event is clearly framed from Winterbourne’s perspective: ’he had turned his eyes towards Daisy and her cavalier. They evidently saw no-one.’ And, later, with the opening of the parasol: ’their heads were hidden from Winterbourne’. Restricting at crucial moments our observation of a central action to what a subsidiary character can see is an important structural device in the novel (as so often in James). Like Winterbourne, we are left at this moment in the narrative in a state of uncertainty concerning the exact nature of Daisy’s relationship (sexual or merely flirtatious?) with her cavalier (courtly gentleman or lover?).

Other indications of limited knowledge include phrases of doubt, such as ’it seemed/appeared/looked as if’. The following paragraph, for example, from a story by Nadine Gordimer, uses several signals of doubt (such as ’no doubt’, ’somehow’ and the question form: ’Hadn’t he written a book about the Bay of Pigs?’):

The voice of the telephone, this time, was American - soft, cautious - no doubt the man thought the line was tapped. Robert Greenman Ceretti,

from Washington; while they were talking, she remembered that this was the political columnist who had somehow been connected with the Kennedy administration. Hadn’t he written a book about the Bay of Pigs? Anyway, she had certainly seen him quoted.

It is no accident, of course, that this kind of narrowing down of a potentially omniscient narration should come in a narration that aligns itself strongly with the consciousness of one character, even while remaining third person. It is important to recognize, therefore, that third person narration need not always embody objectivity. It can quite easily work from subjective, internal and restricted positions.