Point of View: No Social Distancing, Please

As we all know, point of view (POV) is the personage from whose perspective we readers perceive the action of the novel. Back in the nineteenth century, authors tended to go for the “omniscient narrator”—a disembodied, god-like voice that took no personal part in the action, that could see what was in the heart of everyone, could see what the villains were up to behind the protagonist’s back, and could see what everybody looked like. Could see, in short, both the inside and the outside of all the characters. Often the omniscient narrator even knew what would happen in the future, and he clued us in to his superpower with phrases like, “Jane did not know it then, but it would be her last evening in New York.” This POV is often used in the framing device of a person telling a story that has been transmitted to him by others, so that they are looking back on events. There’s not a thing wrong with that approach. It has advantages.

You can fill the reader in on all sorts of facts that help him follow the story without the protagonist having to know. But it is literally distant—it keeps the reader at arm’s length from the action and emotions. She is always just watching, as from the audience of a stage play.

Scoot in closer...

Much more popular these days are closer points of view. You can argue the cause—do we crave closeness in an increasingly depersonalized world?—but most readers seem to like to view the action from the point of view of a single character. Now, the POV can vary. One chapter or scene may be from one personage’s viewpoint and the next from that of someone else. This makes up for the limitations in any one character’s knowledge. But we can only be watching the action from the eyes of one person at a time.

And more importantly, we can only feel what that one person is feeling. A distant third-person POV pretty much limits itself to what that character sees and hears; it can’t read the minds of others. It can’t say “Jane was glad to leave New York, but Peter wasn’t.” If Jane is the POV character, she can only know her own feelings, not Peter’s. Let her tell us something like, “Jane was glad to leave New York, but Peter threw down his book and stomped out of the room.” Those actions are what Jane could see and know about Peter’s reaction. Conversely, no third-person POV lets us see the POV character from the outside. She can’t tell us what she looks like, or what expression overtakes her. “Jane was glad”, not “A flush of pleasure made Jane’s face rosy.”

And closer…

Still, a distant third person doesn’t give us any particular insights into the interior of the POV character. And so there is a “close third person” POV, which takes us inside the protagonist's (or other’s) head, shows what they’re thinking, what they’re feeling as if we were they and they were we. I must say, I’m partial to this POV, because it gives us another layer to reveal about the character that they might dissemble on the outside. The more visceral—the more corporeal— the descriptions of their emotions, the more we become them. We shiver with trepidation, our heartbeats quicken, our throat tightens up as if we were really in that character’s body and not just their head. It takes a bit of self-awareness on the author’s part to stay consistently in character and not let slip something that their POV couldn’t know.

Anybody else out there?

But the third person POV, distant or close, is only one of several options for point of view. There is, of course, first-person. “I did this or that.” It’s a very popular device, to make one of the characters tell the tale in their own voice. It might be imagined that this draws the reader more closely into that person’s head, but I’m not sure it always does. There are so many things a character wouldn’t say or even know about herself. However, it’s widely used as a way to establish immediacy.

And then there’s the second person: “You did this or that.” Presumably, this makes the reader complicit, puts him on stage with the cast. But it’s really hard to handle well. I personally find it irritating, and I guess others do too because you don’t see much of it. For a strikingly successful second-person POV, see Rumer Godden’s short story, “You Needed to Go Upstairs.”

Whichever POV you use, just be consistent and don’t break out of character.