100 likes | 218 Vues
POINT OF VIEW. First Person. First person singular is most natural Can be language of persona or character (not author). Narrator has different views from author. E.L. Doctorow: “…a novelist is a person who can live in other people’s skins.”
E N D
First Person • First person singular is most natural • Can be language of persona or character (not author). Narrator has different views from author. • E.L. Doctorow: “…a novelist is a person who can live in other people’s skins.” • Can explore demons (your own or the world’s) or angels (same).
Narrator • Distance of Narrator helps tell your story • Close: assumes voices • Objective: records things as they appear • Dostoyevski’s Notes from the Underground (Fiction Writer’s Workshop 103) (self-conscious unreliable narrator)
First Person Multiple POV • Use several first person narrators. Example: Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury: “I tried to tell it again, the same story through the eyes of another brother. That was still not it...third brother…still not it…[made] myself the spokesman. It was still not complete.”
Epistolary Fiction • Alice Walker’s The Color Purple writes to God • Visualize a person and write to her. • Steinbeck said to find one trustworthy ear to talk to. • Could be a telephone conversation.
Pros of First Person • Technically the least ambiguous—reader accepts. • Not science! Tells story subjectively. • Can avoid standard English (unlike 3rd person that requires standard Eng.) • May use slang, bad grammar, everyday language. • Direct access to person’s thoughts
Cons of First Person • Can’t look outside or in other people’s heads. • Implies speaker is alive (except in The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold). So there’s less suspense. • Have to invent voice for each story.
Third Person • Omniscient is used infrequently in modern fiction. Fiction Writer’s Workshop 105. • Limited • Subjective resembles 1st person narrative but uses standard English (107-108) • Objective—observe what she is doing, but don’t enter her head. (110)
Limited perspective: author should not intrude • Multiple (Writer’s Workshop 109) • Objective or theatrical has no author’s voice that favors any character (110)
2nd Person • Author makes believe that she is talking to someone, describing what the person addressed is doing. • The “you” is not the reader, but this approach gives that impression. See Pam Houston’s “How to Talk to a Hunter.”