Narrative Modes: Point of View

Who is going to tell your story? A simple question yet with far reaching consequences.

If one of the characters tells it and refers to himself as “I”. Example; “I saw her do that" then it is in the first person. This character cannot know what others are thinking, or events that happen elsewhere out of view: but he knows his own thoughts, which he may say or not, and he relates the events as he knows them. He talks in his own voice. This narrator may or may not be conscious of telling the story to a given audience. Compared to the other narrative modes, first person is the most remote from the author.

The narrator rarely refers to the focal character or characters as “you” — Example; “you did this then you did that” — this is in second person. The reader is intimate to this type of narration, and unavoidably becomes one of the characters. It is often told in the present tense.

“Your day was one meeting after another, phone calls and problems. You might repeat a bit of dialogue from an endless meeting with the CEO, who had nothing to say. It was late when you left the office. All you could think of was getting home”.

The most common narrative mode however, and certainly the least limited, is third person. The narrator may be a character or the author. All of the characters in third person are referred to as he or she, never I, we, or you. This narrator may be a character or the author, who may be transparent (as invisible as a narrator can be) or not (an author whose presence is never in doubt).  

This narrator may be located on a graph as indicated: 

 This graphic shows two authorial continua: objective -- subjective (knows no thoughts or feeling -- knows thoughts and feelings; and ignorant omniscient (knows nothing -- knows everything - all feelings, thoughts, and events). What the

reader is told depends on where you position the narrator. This becomes a problem when the reader is given information the narrator could not have known: for example, when the narrator is objective and at some point says what someone is thinking; or when the narrator represents one character, but at some point has knowledge of someone else’s thoughts or actions that happened outside his actual awareness.

Other types of narrative modes include: 

Stream of consciousness: where the narration tries to imitate the interior thoughts, feelings, and desires, usually of the narrative or focal character

Unreliable narrator: this narrator cannot be trusted to tell the truthful story.  This may be because of bias, ignorance, instability, childishness, etc.

Multiple-person: here there are multiple characters who tell the story, obviously from different point of views.