POINT of VIEW

1st Person POV I, me, my, we, our…

• True--nervous--very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?  The disease had sharpened my senses--not destroyed--not dulled them.  Above all was the sense of hearing acute.  I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth.  I heard many things in hell.  How, then, am I mad?  Hearken!  and observe how healthily--how calmly I can tell you the whole story.

                  --Edgar Allan Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1850)

Example …

2nd Person POV

You, yours, your, yourself

• You are not the kind of guy who would be in a place like this at this time of the morning.  But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy.  You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head.  The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge.  All might come clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder.  Then again, it might not.

          --Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City (1984)

Example …

3rd Person POV

Omniscient Limited

Omniscient Objective

Omniscient = all knowing…the narrator can see into the minds of all characters.

3rd Person POV: Omniscient

A poor man had twelve children and worked night and day just to get enough bread for them to eat.  Now when the thirteenth came into the world, he did not know what to do and in his misery ran out onto the great highway to ask the first person he met to be godfather.  The first to come along was God, and he already knew what it was that weighed on the man’s mind and said, “Poor man, I pity you.  I will hold your child at the font and I will look after it and make it happy upon earth.”

•             --Jakob & Wilhelm Grimm, “Godfather Death” (1812)

Example … (Remember – “dialogue” doesn’t count!)

Narrator can see into ONE character’s mind.

3rd Person POV: Limited Omniscient

• Although she had been around them her whole life, it was when she reached thirty-five that holding babies seemed to make her nervous--just at the beginning, a twinge of stage fright swinging up from the gut.  “Andrienne, would you like to hold the baby?  Would you mind?”  Always these words from a woman her age looking kind and beseeching--a former friend, she was losing her friends to babble and beseech--and Andrienne would force herself to breathe deep.  Holding a baby was no longer natural--she was no longer natural--but a test of womanliness and earthly skills.

•             --Lorrie Moore, “Terrific Mother” (1992)

Example …

3rd Person POV: Objective Narrator only describes

and does not enter characters’ thoughts.

• The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green.  The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o’clock; in some towns there were so many people that the lottery took two days and had to be started on June 26th, but in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took less than two hours, so it could begin at ten o’clock in the morning and still be through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner.

            --Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery” (1948)

Example …