ways of projecting a point of view: one in which a third person narrator
tells us what a particular character is thinking and feeling; the other in
which the voice of the character actually takes over so that narrator and
focaliser become almost inseparable. The advantage of the third person is
that you can oscillate between a more distant perspective, which is an
overview, and a particular character’s point of view. You can look both
with the character and at them. The advantage of the first person, however,
is that you can capture that character’s voice (or voices), and move more
obviously close to their thought patterns.
In Example 5.3 the narrator was Sophie, and the point of view was
obviously hers. However Sophie’s point of view could also be projected
through a third person narrator:
Example 5.10: Point of view, third person narration
Throughout that week Sophie began to realise that her position was
weakening. It was hard to tell what people on the board were
thinking: she could only guess. She did not know whether the position
was becoming so extreme that she might be ousted. The board
members had an outlook that was so fundamentally opposed to hers
that it was impossible to persuade them of anything: they didn’t
understand art, and more to the point they didn’t like it.All they were
interested in, as far as she could see, was profit and loss. She suspected
they disliked aspects of her manner, but she didn’t know how far it
would take them. Such matters were difficult to assess.Any point of view is not only a matter of individual outlook, it will
inevitably reflect the cultural discourses in which a character is caught or
which she or he seeks to evade. A person’s perspective depends on a whole
array of factors, such as social situation, age, sex or ethnicity. For example,
an Australian-born child’s perspective will be radically different from her
Polish grandmother’s way of looking at the world, partly because of the
generation gap, and partly because her grandmother was born into, and
emigrated from, another culture. Sophie’s point of view partly results from
her identification with discourses about the significance of art, and partly
from a certain disdain for commercial values (even though she may be a
good financial manager).
Constructing a point of view
Sometimes when you approach point of view you may have a particular
person (fictional or otherwise) in mind. Let’s try now, however, to build up
a point of view without any pre-existing idea in mind (see Exercise 6).
96 The Writing Experiment