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.