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Point of View
The position or vantage-point from which the events of a story seem to be observed and presented to us. The chief distinction usually made between points of view is that between third-person narratives and first-person narratives.
A third-person narrator may be omniscient, and therefore show an unrestricted knowledge of the story's events from outside or 'above' them; but another kind of third-person narrator may confine our knowledge of events to whatever is observed by a single character or small group of characters, this method being known as 'limited point of view.' A first-person narrator's point of view will normally be restricted to his or her partial knowledge and experience, and therefore will not give us access to other characters' hidden thoughts. Many modern authors have also used 'multiple point of view', in which we are shown the events from the positions of two or more different characters. Unreliable Narrator A narrator whose account of events appears to be faulty, misleadingly biased, or otherwise distorted, so that it departs from the 'true' understanding of events shared between the reader and the implied author. The discrepancy between the unreliable narrator's view of events and the view that readers suspect to be more accurate creates a sense of irony. The term does not necessarily mean that such a narrator is morally untrustworthy or a habitual liar (although this may be true in some cases), since the category also includes harmlessly naive, 'fallible', or ill-informed narrators. A classic case is Huck in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884): this fourteen-year-old narrator does not understand the full significance of the events he is relating and commenting on. Other kinds of unreliable narrator seem to be falsifying their accounts from motives of vanity or malice. In either case, the reader is offered the pleasure of picking up 'clues' in the narrative that betray the true state of affairs. This kind of first-person narrative is particularly favoured in 20th-century fiction: a virtuoso display of its use is William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (1929), which employs three unreliable narrators---an imbecile, a suicidal student, and an irritable racist bigot. from Chris Baldick, Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Questions about Narration and Point of View • Does the narrator speak in the first, second, or third person? • Is the story narrated in the past or present tense? Does the verb tense affect your reading of it in any way? • Does the narrator use a distinctive vocabulary, style, and tone, or is the language more standard and neutral? • Is the narrator identified as a character, and if so, how much does he or she participate in the action? • Does the narrator ever seem to speak to the reader directly (addressing “you”) or explicitly state opinions or values? • Do you know what every character is thinking, or only some characters, or none? • Does the narrative voice or focus shift durng the story or remain consistent? • Do the narrator, the characters, and the reader all perceive matters in the same way, or are there differences in levels of understanding(114)?
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