4. First person Narrator
Benefits:
• Readers see events from
the perspective of an
important character
• Readers often
understand the main
character better
5. First person Narrator
Detriments:
• The narrator may be
unreliable—insane, naïve,
deceptive, narrow minded
etc...
• Readers see only one
perspective
6. First person Narrator
“If you really want to hear about it, the first
thing you’ll probably want to know is where
I was born, and what my lousy childhood
was like, and how my parents were
occupied and all before they had me, and
all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but
I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to
know the truth. In the first place, that stuff
bores me, and in the second place, my
parents would have about two
hemorrhages apiece if I told anything
pretty personal about them.”
--J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
7. First person PERSON cont’d
FIRST Narrator
“You don’t know about me without
you have read a book by the
name of The Adventures of Tom
Sawyer, but it ain’t no
matter. That book was made by
Mr. Mark Twain and he told the
truth, mainly. There was things
he stretched, but mainly he told
the truth. That is nothing. I
never seen anybody but lied one
time or another...”
--Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
(1881)
8. First person Narrator
• True--nervous--very, very dreadfully
nervous I had been and am; but why will
you say that I am mad? The disease had
sharpened my senses--not destroyed--not
dulled them. Above all was the sense of
hearing acute. I heard all things in the
heaven and in the earth. I heard many
things in hell. How, then, am I
mad? Hearken! and observe how
healthily--how calmly I can tell you the
whole story.
--Edgar Allan Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart”
(1850)
9. First person Narrator
• There was music from my neighbor’s house
through the summer nights. In his blue gardens
men and girls came and went like moths among
the whisperings and the champagne and the
stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his
guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking
the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two
motor-boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing
aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On weekends
his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing
parties to and from the city between nine in the
morning and long past midnight...
--F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
11. 2nd Person POV
• A second-person
POV is rare
• Uses “you” and
presents commands
• Often the narrator
is speaking to
him/herself
12. 2nd Person POV
• “Wash the white clothes on Monday and put
them on the stone heap; wash the color
clothes on Tuesday and put them on the
clothesline to dry; don't walk barehead in
the hot sun; cook pumpkin fritters in very hot
sweet oil; soak your little cloths right after
you take them off; when buying cotton to
make yourself a nice blouse, be sure that it
doesn't have gum on it, because that way it
won't hold up well after a wash; soak salt
fish overnight before you cook it;”
--Jamaica Kincaid, “Girl”
13. 2nd Person POV
• You are not the kind of guy who
would be a place like this at this
time of the morning. But here you
are, and you cannot say that the
terrain is entirely unfamiliar,
although the details are fuzzy. You
are at a nightclub talking to a girl
with a shaved head. The club is
either Heartbreak or the Lizard
Lounge. All might come clear if you
could just slip into the bathroom and
do a little more Bolivian Marching
Powder. Then again, it might not.
--Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City (1984)
15. 3rd Person POV: Omniscient
Omniscient = all knowing…the
narrator can see into the minds
of all characters
16. 3rd Person POV: Omniscient
Omniscient:
• godlike narrator;
he/she can enter
character's minds and
know everything that
is going
on, past, present, and
future.
• May be a narrator
outside the text
17. 3rd Person POV: Omniscient
•Advantage:
very natural technique;
author is, after
all, omniscient
regarding his work.
18. 3rd Person POV: Omniscient
• Disadvantage:
not lifelike; narrator
knows and tells all; is
truly a convention of
literature
19. 3rd Person POV: Omniscient
A poor man had twelve children and worked
night and day just to get enough bread for
them to eat. Now when the thirteenth came
into the world, he did not know what to do
and in his misery ran out onto the great
highway to ask the first person he met to be
godfather. The first to come along was
God, and he already knew what it was that
weighed on the man’s mind and said, “Poor
man, I pity you. I will hold your child at the
font and I will look after it and make it
happy upon earth.”
• --Jakob & Wilhelm
Grimm, “Godfather Death” (1812)
20. 3rd Person POV: Omniscient
• “It was the best of times, it was the worst of
times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the
age of foolishness, it was the epoch of
belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was
the season of Light, it was the season of
Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the
winter of despair, we had everything before
us, we had nothing before us, we were all
going direct to Heaven, we were all going
direct the other way--in short, the period was
so far like the present period, that some of its
nosiest authorities insisted on its being
received, for good or for evil, in the
superlative degree of comparison only.”
• --Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two
Cities (1859)
21. 3rd Person POV: Limited Omniscient
Narrator can see
into ONE
character’s mind.
22. 3rd Person POV: Limited Omniscient
„ All
characters
have
thought
privacy
except ONE.
23. 3rd Person POV: Limited Omniscient
„ Gives the
impression that
we are very
close to the
mind of that ONE
character,
though viewing it
from a distance.
24. 3rd Person POV: Limited Omniscient
„ Sometimes this
narrator can be
too focused or
may impose
his/her own
opinions with no
grounds.
25. 3rd Person POV: Limited Omniscient
• The girl he loved was shy and quick
and the smallest in the class, and
usually she said nothing, but one day
she opened her mouth and roared, and
when the teacher--it was French class--
asked her what she was doing, she
said, in French, I am a lion, and he
wanted to smell her breath and put his
hand against the rumblings in her
throat.
--Elizabeth Graver, “The Boy Who Fell Forty Feet”
(1993)
26. 3rd Person POV: Limited Omniscient
„ Although she had been around them her
whole life, it was when she reached
thirty-five that holding babies seemed to
make her nervous--just at the beginning, a
twinge of stage fright swinging up from the
gut. “Andrienne, would you like to hold
the baby? Would you mind?” Always these
words from a woman her age looking kind
and beseeching--a former friend, she was
losing her friends to babble and beseech--
and Andrienne would force herself to
breathe deep. Holding a baby was no
longer natural--she was no longer
natural--but a test of womanliness and
earthly skills.
27. 3rd Person POV: Objective
Narrator only describes
and does not enter
characters’ thoughts.
28. 3rd Person POV: Objective
„ Like a video
camera, the
narrator reports
what happens and
what the
characters are
saying.
29. 3rd Person POV: Objective
„ The narrator
adds no
comment about
how the
characters are
feeling.
30. 3rd Person POV: Objective
„ The narrator offers
no comment on the
mood of the setting—
no mention of
awkwardness, ease, t
ension etc...
31. 3rd Person POV: Objective
• The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the
fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were
blossoming profusely and the grass was richly
green. The people of the village began to gather in the
square, between the post office and the bank, around ten
o’clock; in some towns there were so many people that
the lottery took two days and had to be started on June
26th, but in this village, where there were only about
three hundred people, the whole lottery took less than
two hours, so it could begin at ten o’clock in the
morning and still be through in time to allow the
villagers to get home for noon dinner.
--Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery” (1948)
32. 3rd Person POV: Objective
"You should have killed yourself last week," he said to the deaf man. The old man
motioned with his finger. "A little more," he said. The waiter poured on into the glass
so that the brandy slopped over and ran down the stem into the top saucer of the pile.
"Thank you," the old man said. The waiter took the bottle back inside the cafe. He sat
down at the table with his colleague again.
"He's drunk now," he said.
"He's drunk every night."
"What did he want to kill himself for?"
"How should I know."
"How did he do it?"
"He hung himself with a rope."
"Who cut him down?"
"His niece."
"Why did they do it?"
"Fear for his soul."
“A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”
by Ernest Hemingway
33. POINT of VIEW
Remember, Point of View =
Who is telling the story and how
much they contribute.
The end.
