vol. 1, 2007
On Point-of-view
Bret Anthony Johnston
I become the characters I write about. When I write about a thief,
I become one… I become the characters I write about and I bless the
Latin poet Terence who said, “Nothing human is alien to me.” –Carson
McCullers
Caress the detail, the divine detail. –Vladimir Nabokov
Point-of-view is the aspect of fiction-writing that most regularly trips up my students. I’m never surprised. Despite a profound and passionate knowledge about which point-of-view is which—in graduate school, an argument over whether a story was written in third-person limited or third-person omniscient almost came to blows—many writers lack a clear understanding of what point-of-view actually is. Every semester, I read story after story in which there are no overt point-of-view violations, no unintentional second-person to third-person switches, but the perspective in each narrative is badly compromised. Take, for example, the middle-aged father/narrator who, during his son’s burial, launches into an extended meditation on his bland prom date, or in a different story, the carjacker who, oblivious to the caliber of his pistol, prattles on about his victims’ Ann Taylor blouses, Prada pumps, French-tipped nails. That the father might have other matters on his mind, or that the carjacker would likely focus on different details, never occurred to the authors. Those considerations, however, are tantamount to creating a believable and affecting point-of-view.
Point-of-view is arguably the most important decision for an author to make since it determines—from the first word of the narrative—how the prose will be presented to the reader. Imagine Moby Dick beginning, “His name was Ishmael.” Or, “My parents named me Ishmael, not a name I liked very much, not until recently.” Or what if Nabokov had written Lolita from Dolores’s perspective, or the jury’s, or the judge’s? Would the reader still harbor those complicated, entangled feelings toward Humbert Humbert, or would we have written him off as a monster and immediately tossed the unread book into the garbage? Would Jane Austen’s novels retain their whimsy and sublime insights and unexpectedly wicked humor if they were written in the second-person; would McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City or Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, both of which are told through second-person narration, feel so immediate if they had more conventional narrators? Personally, I can’t imagine Holden Caulfield calling everyone “imbeciles” or “knuckleheads” instead of “phonies”, and I’m not sure Alice Sebold’s gorgeous and heart-wrenching The Lovely Bones would retain its raw formidability were it narrated by little Susie Salmon’s murderer instead of the dead girl herself.
For the many vague and mercurial definitions of point-of-view (POV), the one that seems most helpful to my students comes from Ethan Canin. POV boils down to this:
Selection of Detail
Ordering of Events
What would this particular character think—recall, ponder, etc.—or do or feel at this particular time? In what order would this narrator tell this story? Which experiences from this character’s life would she include to move the reader? In many ways, the goal of the writer trying to develop a compelling point-of-view is similar to a method actor: you want to become the character. Journalists write about characters; creative writers write as the characters. (Flaubert: “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.”) The trick to becoming a character is to see through their eyes, to hear through their ears, to understand their unique desires and to feel their individual memories.
After my students get a basic handle on identifying the various POVs (First-person: “I robbed a bank yesterday.” Second-person: “You robbed a bank yesterday.” Third-person: “He [or she] robbed a bank yesterday.”), we’ll spend some time imagining a small room containing only a fireplace, a flickering fire, and four characters: A six-year-old girl. An elderly grandmother. A nurse. A murderer fleeing the police. Then, writing from the perspective of the young girl, the class will try to perceive the fire and the other characters through her consciousness. What memories does the fire evoke for her? What have her parents told her about fire? To what will this character compare the flames, their color, their size? Will she want to touch them, will she be afraid of them? Our goal is to imagine fully the child’s perspective, to experience the moment through her senses and her senses alone. Eventually, we do the same for the other three characters.
The mechanism of the exercise is blatant—four different characters describing the same artifact in utterly different ways—but I’m always struck by how quickly and thoroughly it crystallizes the concept of deep point-of-view for students. Whereas before their methods of selection for what to include in a story were arbitrary at best, now, after the crash course in POV, they recognize the character as the sole organizing principle of the narrative. And the exercise inspires surprising and sophisticated observations: The nurse who thinks to douse the fire for safety or to start a bonfire outside the house to signal for help; the murderer who employs a burning log as a weapon or the instrument of his own excruciating demise; the grandmother who recalls the wood stove of her youth. And then there’s my all-time personal favorite, the little girl who, despite her parents’ repeated warnings, reaches into the fire. Does she pull back in time? Does she get burned? It doesn’t matter. The image is characterologically correct, beautiful and terrifying, but more than that, I love its implicit message: Question everything you’ve ever been taught, act boldly, trust yourself. This is a lesson unto itself, and it’s as perfect a blueprint for the writing life as I’ve ever known.