A character storming out of a room to confront a cheating spouse, a protagonist agonizing over what to wear in advance of having brunch with her mother-in-law, the detective going back to the crime scene after a flash of insight - these are all examples of narrative actions. The narrative function describes those aspects of a book which operate as, quite simply, the story. Throughout all successful works of fiction, then, point of view is the ever present current, the near-invisible force that dictates the shape and feel of a book.Ī novel may be thought of as consisting of two parts, running concurrently with each other. While he has as much interest in the inner lives of his actors as any true Modernist, his Victorian insistence on guiding the reader through every moment means that instead of experiencing characters’ thoughts and memories, they are presented in antiseptic, smoothed-over blocks of text. On the other hand, part of what makes Henry James so difficult to access, despite his virtuosity, is the barrier the inexhaustible and never-silent narrative entity creates between reader and character. Without her trademark free-indirect narration 5, that work would lose its ability to cause the reader to experience the central characters’ emotional and mental journeys across its resonant hours. The perfectly precise and brilliantly sympathetic blending between Virginia Woolf’s narration and her characters give Mrs.
The technical decisions and mechanical skills of the writer in their use of point of view have major effects on the overall success of a novel. 4 As we shall see, Cusk in her later work begins from, but rapidly expands, these neat and useful terms. Conversely, “Multiple Selective Omniscience” is Friedman’s term for a limited third-person point of view that moves between the minds, actions, and surroundings of two or more characters. “I-as-Protagonist” is the quintessential first-person approach, where the narrator and the hero are one and the same. 3 Two of them appear in the works discussed here. His examination, Point of View in Fiction, delineates eight technical approaches to establishing the relationship between author and reader. An especially useful study is Norman Friedman’s clear and logical system of classification. Scholarship that is heavily relied on will be noted throughout, but for simplicity’s sake, this essay will focus on first- and third-person, looking at two novels using each. The number of essays, articles, and full books written on point of view and other elements of the craft is nearly as great as approaches to the medium itself.
A quick note regarding technical definitions may be appropriate.
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