Point of View

 

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        The "Point of view" refers to the perspective from which a story is told—the mode (or modes) chosen by the author to convey to the reader the characters, dialogue, actions, setting, and events that make up the narrative in a work of fiction. Since the advent of the modern novel in the eighteenth century, the issue of point of view has consistently been one of practical concern for novelists, and there have been sporadic observations on the subject in critical writings. Percy Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction (1926), which codified and expanded on James' remarks, and Henry James' prefaces to his various novels, however, made point of view one of the most prominent and enduring concerns in modern treatments of the art of prose fiction.
        A variety of storytelling techniques have been developed by authors, and numerous single works demonstrate this diversity. However, the condensed classification given below is widely accepted and can be used as a starting point for examining conventional forms of narration and identifying the dominant form in mixed narrative modes. The two narration styles that are by far the most popular are first-person and third-person. It establishes a broad distinction between these two modes before classifying third-person narratives into subcategories based on the level and type of freedom or limitation the author assumes in order to communicate the story to the reader. After that, it briefly discusses the uncommon form of second-person narration.
    In a third-person narrative, the narrator is someone who is not a part of the action and who addresses each character by name or pronouncing them as "he," "she," or "they." Emma by Jane Austen begins: "Emma Woodhouse had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with little to distress or vex her." Emma is described as being "handsome, clever, and rich with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seeming to unite some of the best blessings of existence." In a first-person narrative, the narrator uses the pronoun "I" and is either the protagonist of the story or to some extent a participant in it.

 I. Third-person viewpoints 

A. The omniscient point of view. This is a common term for the many and various works of fiction that follow the convention that the narrator has exclusive access to the characters' thoughts, feelings, and motivations. It also implies that the narrator is free to move about at will in time and space, switch between characters, and report (or conceal) their speech, deeds, and states of consciousness.

B. The limited point of view:  Although the story is told in the third person, the narrator only describes what one character (or at most a small number of characters) within the story perceives, thinks, remembers, and feels. Such a chosen character was referred to as Henry James' "focus," "mirror," or "cen- ter of consciousness" when he refined this narrative mode. All the events and actions are depicted as they happen in many of James' later works, and they are filtered to the reader through the unique perceptions, awareness, and reactions of just one character;.
II. First-person points of view
When used consistently, this mode restricts the subject matter of the narrative to what the first-person narrator learns from conversing with other characters. We make a distinction between the narrative "I" who is merely a fortuitous witness and auditor of the matters he relates (Marlow in Heart of Darkness and other works by Joseph Conrad); who is a participant, but only a minor or peripheral one, in the story (Ishmael in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick; Nick in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby); and who is himself or herself the central character in the The protagonist of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man exhibits a complex narrative mode in which the first-person narrator's character focus is on the perceptions of a third party—white America—to whom the protagonist is "invisible" because he is black. See epistolary novel under novels for information on a specific first-person narrative style.
III. Second-person points of view
Using the second-person pronoun "you," the narrator addresses someone who is depicted as actually experiencing the events that are being described, and this is the mode that has been given this name. This style of narration was occasionally used in traditional fiction, but it hasn't been used consistently—and even then, only occasionally—since the latter half of the 20th century. The result is a virtuoso performance. They all use "you" as the narrator to tell their stories: Michel Butor's La Modification (1957; translated as Second Thoughts in 1981), Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (1981; translated as If on a Winter's Night), and Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City (1984).