Writing Great Fiction

Lecture 15: Seeing through Other Eyes—Point of View

Tolstoy’s $QQD.DUHQLQD is told in the past tense, for example, but it was

both written and set during the 1870s. George Eliot’s 0LGGOHPDUFK, on

the other hand, was published in the early 1870s but set 40 years earlier,

in the 1830s. Tolstoy uses the past tense to tell a contemporary story,

while Eliot uses the past tense to tell a story of the recent past, giving the

reader some distance from the events.

o The 40-year timespan may not seem like much, but if we

transfer the difference to the present day, we can see that Eliot’s

XVHRIWKHSDVWWHQVHLVVLJQL¿FDQWO\GLIIHUHQWIURP7ROVWR\¶V

o Consider the difference between watching the two television

shows %UHDNLQJ %DG and 0DG 0HQ: %UHDNLQJ %DG was set

more or less in the present moment, allowing no temporal

distance between the story and the viewers. But with 0DG0HQ,

set in the early 1960s, we can at least cling to the illusion that

we are better behaved than the people who worked on Madison

Avenue were at that time.

Brontë, -DQH(\UH.

Eliot, 0LGGOHPDUFK.

Fitzgerald, 7KH*UHDW*DWVE\.

Lee, 7R.LOOD0RFNLQJELUG.

Melville, 0RE\'LFN.

Nabokov, /ROLWD.

Robinson, +RXVHNHHSLQJ.

Tolstoy, $QQD.DUHQLQD.

Twain, 7KH$GYHQWXUHVRI+XFNOHEHUU\)LQQ.

Suggested Reading