A point of view usually consists of three components:- sensing (how an object/event/person looks, sounds, feels, smells)
- feeling (emotional/affective reaction to the object/event/person)
- thinking (conceptualising the event and accommodating it to a partic-
ular ideological position).
So if you want to build up a point of view you don’t necessarily have to
have an idea: you can just build it from those three words, sensing, feeling,
thinking.
Let’s see how these components can suggest a point of view, even
without any preceding context. When you have set down these basic
words, you can start building up a scenario:
Example 5.11: Constructing a point of view- sensing (child overhears parents’ conversation)
- feeling (finds the conversation threatening)
- thinking (reassesses his attitude towards his parents)
Once you have done this, it is easy to take it one stage further, refining and
developing the narrative:
Example 5.12: Developing a point of view
sensing: A child from an affluent background overhears his mother
and father quarrel.They speak in a way which suggests he is not his
father’s genetic son.
feeling: The child begins to reassess his feelings towards his father. He
starts to let his colder feelings towards him predominate. He also
feels betrayed, but still loves his father.
thinking: The child begins to worry about who his biological father
might be and why he has been lied to. He begins to imagine that he
has always felt somewhat alienated from the comfortable middle-
class environment of which he is part.Here we are projecting the way the child sees the situation. In fact we are
arriving at a particular contemporary version of the Oedipal complex,
where the child feels ambivalent towards the father who may or may not
be his genetic parent. We also see the way he is dangerously caught up in
conservative discourses about the value of ‘blood’ relationships which are
largely at odds with his emotional position and adoptive status. Maybe
he is misinterpreting the overheard conversation, and maybe his conclu-
sion is totally erroneous, but we are building up how he is sensing, feeling
and thinking about the event irrespective of its truth-value. We can also
Narrative, narratology, power 97