Point of View: The

Position of Stance
of the Work’s
Narrator or
Speaker
Subtitle
The Term of Point of View
• Point of View refers to speaker, narrator, persona, or voice
created by author to tell stories, present arguments, and
express attitude and judgments!
• Point of vies involves not only the speaker’s physical position
as an observer and recorder.
• But, the ways in which speaker social, political and mental
circumstances affect the narrative!
Note: point of view is one of the most complex and subtle
aspects of literary study
• Authors try to bring the presentations alive
• Authors impersonate and temporally become the characters
they act!
• Point of vies may also considered as the centralizing or
guiding intelligence in a work
Exercise
Conditions that Affect Point of View
• Point of vies depends on two major:
1. Physical situation of the narrator, or speaker, or observer!
Questions are: how close to the action is the speaker?
Is the speaker a major or mover participants or no more than a
witness, either close or distant?
How much is he or she privileged to know?
How accurate and complete are his or her reports?
How do speaker characteristics emerge from the narration?
What are his or her qualification or limitations as an observer?
Conditions that Affect Point of View
2. The speaker’s intellectual and emotional position
Questions:
How might the speaker gain or lose from what take place in the
story?
Are the speaker’s observer’s observations and words colored by
these interest?
Does he or she have any persuasive purposes beyond being a
straightforward recorder or observer?
What values does the speaker impose upon the action?
Determining a Work's Point of View
• i.e grammatical voices; first, second, or third person then
study ways in which subject, characterization, dialogue, and
form interact with the point of view.
• The voice of “I” using first person point of view
• The impersonation of a fictional narrator or speaker
who may be named or unnamed
• First person speakers report events as though they have
acquired their knowledge in a number of ways:
1. What they themselves have done, said, heard, and thought
(firsthand experience).
2. What they have observed others doing and saying (first hand
witness)
3. What others have said to them or otherwise communicated to
them (secondhand testimony and hearsay)
4. What they are able to infer or deduce from the information they
have discovered (inferential information)
5. What they are able to conjecture about how a character might
think and act, given their knowledge of a situation (conjectural,
imaginative, or intuitive information)
Different kinds of first-person
speakers
• Some first-person speakers are reliable
Determine the narrator’s position and ability, prejudice or self-
interest, and judgment of his or her readers or listeners.
Most of them describing their own experience are to be
accepted as reliable and authoritative.
Sometimes unreliable, they have interests or limitations that
lead to mislead, distort, or even lie.
Second-person; the narrator is speaking to
someone else who is addressed as “You”
• There are two major possibilities:
As a narrator (first person speaker) tells a listener what he or she has done
and said at a past time.
Simple retelling of events, i.e.: parents the child during infancy.
The second possibility is equally complex. Some narrators seem to be
addressing a “you” but are instead referring mainly to themselves – and to
listeners only tangentially- in preference to “I”.
Narrators follow usage of the indefinite “you”.
The use of you, or thou refers not to a specific listeners but rather to anyone
at all.
Avoid of formal words; one, a person, people
Third-person, the speaker emphasizes
the actions and speeches of others
• Third person (he, she, it, they)
• Not easy to characterize
• Sometimes use “I”, and may seemingly be identical with the
author, but at other times the author creates a distinct
authorial voices.
• Variants of third-person: dramatic or objective, omniscient,
and limited ominiscient
Dramatic/objective, and
omniscient and limited omniscient
• Dramatic/objective: most direct presentation of action and dialogue.
The basic method of rendering action and speech that all the points of
view share.
Unidentified speaker who reports things in a way that is analogous to
a hovering or tracking video camera or called “a fly on the wall or tree.
The narrators always on the spot to tell us what is happening and what
is being said.
Not deliver a conclusions or make interpretations, because the
premise of this point of view is the readers, like a jury.
Omniscient and Limited
omniscient
• Omniscient (all-knowing) not only speak the actions or speech
but also what goes in mind of the characters.
• Limited omniscient:
Concentrates on or limits the narration to the actions and
thoughts of a major character.
May explore the mentality of the major character either lightly
or depth.
Focus on central figure