Points Of View

Regular readers of this blog might remember that one of my interests, indeed one of my preoccupations, in works of fiction is the narrative point of view, or "pov," which Poul Anderson always handles extremely well. I want to discuss povs in general before returning to Anderson's presentation of them in his Time Patrol story, "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth."

I think that I have always been aware of povs and probably all readers are even if they think that they are not. Kevin, whom I meet once a month in the Gregson Centre, and I had both read a Hornblower novel. I drew attention to a pov shift and he said that he would not have noticed such a thing. But he would surely have been aware of povs at least while reading. A French guy was reading Dune in translation. I remarked that Frank Herbert's prose has no consistent point of view. The French guy replied, "I have read it!," meaning that he had noticed Herbert's pov inconsistency.

In Volume II of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, while Blomkvist and Bjork converse, we are told that:

"Blomkvist worried..."

-Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played With Fire (London, 2009), CHAPTER 19, p. 318 -

- but also that Bjork thinks:

"How the hell could Blomkvist know anything about Zalachenko?"

-ibid., p. 319.

Indeed, the omniscient narrator informs his readers that, at this point, feelings and thoughts are tumbling through Bjork's head. Thus, in the course of a single conversation, the pov shifts from Blomkvist to Bjork - and back again because, almost immediately after Bjork's thought, we are informed that Blomkvist realizes that he is unscrupulous enough to double-cross Bjork and that he feels no guilt.

James Blish, writing as William Atheling, Jr., sets out why this is wrong while reviewing a short story entitled "Final Exam" by an author called Arthur Zirul:

"A conscientious editor, for instance, would have told Mr. Zirul that he had failed to make himself aware of so simple a technical problem in fiction-writing as that of how to handle the point of view. He would have pointed out that in "Final Exam" there is no consistent point of view; instead, the author is omniscient, and tells us what each and every character is thinking (including the horse). He would have explained that the author-omniscient method of handling this problem, while it is not necessarily always bad, is at the very least obsolescent, and that common practice in modern fiction is to assign a single point of view for a short story, or at the very most, a single point of view for each plot thread. This, the author would explain, is not an arbitrary rule, but instead is based upon a great deal of accumulated experience as to how a reader reads, and what techniques give the reader the greatest access to what is important in the story. Modern readers in particular, the editor would be able to point out, are not used to being forced to leapfrog from one character's mind to another's at the author's whim; instead, they have been trained to identify with some single central character, and to be admitted to his thoughts only. Certainly no modern reader is going to react favorably to a point of view which may shift from one paragraph to another, or even from one sentence to another."

-William Atheling, The Issue At Hand (Chicago, 1967), p. 85.

Some Points To Note

(i) Atheling/Blish refers explicitly to short stories whereas I also discuss novels. However, the same principle applies. A novel should not have a chaotic pov! The whole novel or at least each chapter or at least each section of a chapter, each discrete narrative passage, should have a single pov.

(ii) Although Atheling refers to "...the author-omniscient...," I think that the author and the omniscient narrator are different. The author, usually, is simply not present in a fictional text. Of course he can write himself in as a character or as a first person narrator but it has to be clear to the reader if that is what he is doing. In a third person narrative, it is surely an omniscient narrator who tells readers what the viewpoint character sees, feels, thinks etc. It is not the character that does this. But nor is the author directly addressing his readers as in an Introduction or Afterword.

(iii) I think that there has to be a single pov because otherwise the text does not describe anything that happens. If Blomkvist and Bjork converse, then what happens is that Blomkvist experiences the entire conversation from his pov and Bjork experiences it from his pov but there is no third pov jumping back and forth between them.

Another writer, CS Lewis, fully understood povs but broke the rules creatively:

Lewis as a writer and a Professor of Literature knew that authors must understand and control narrative points of view. If an entire novel is not written from a single point of view, then each Chapter or at least each section of a Chapter, each passage of continuous prose narrative between changes of scene, should have a single point of view. That Hideous Strength breaks some rules of points of view but in interesting ways. It contains:

several viewpoint characters;
one first person viewpoint character;
an imaginary observer;
a first person narrator of other passages in the novel;
an omniscient narrator of yet other passages in the novel.

I identify the first person viewpoint character with Lewis because he tells us:

"...I am Oxford-bred and very fond of Cambridge..." (2)

The opening and closing viewpoint character of the novel is Jane Studdock. The main continuing viewpoint character throughout the novel is Mark Studdock. In fact, the novel principally follows Mark's moral and  spiritual development. Temporary view point characters during the novel are Lewis, Ransom, Dimble, Frost, Wither, the tramp, Mr Maggs, Miss Hardcastle, Feverstone, Filostrato and Mr Bultitude. When Lewis is the viewpoint character, he narrates in the first person. However, a first person narrator, presumably also Lewis, sometimes imparts information about other characters. For example, of the fleeing tramp we are told:

"I have not been able to trace him further." (3)

At one point, this first person narrator invites the reader to imagine an observer placed high enough to see both a car carrying Mark and, later, a train carrying Jane from the town where they live. "...our imaginary observer..." has what we call a bird's eye, or god's eye, view of some English countryside. (4) An imaginary observer who saw not just at one place and time but at all places and times would be an omniscient observer and would thus share one attribute of the God in whom Lewis believed. Such an observer would have been promoted from a god's eye view to the God's eye view. The omniscient narrator who is present in much fiction and in some parts of this novel is presumably an omniscient observer who narrates some of what s/he observes.

Before leaving the first person narrator, Lewis, we can note that he sometimes adopts the first person plural, as when he refers to "...our imaginary observer...," thus getting the readers on his side. (4) When he refers to the British press as "...our papers...," he again identifies himself as one of us, a citizen who reads the same newspapers that we do. (4) The omniscient narrator would refer merely to "...the papers."

However, the omniscient narrator is also present and tells us things that the first person narrator could not have known: something that Curry thinks but immediately and permanently forgets; what Frost, Filostrato and Wither were thinking as they died. This narrator could have told us where the tramp went.

Mark confronts Dimble. Conventionally, their conversation should be described either from Mark's or from Dimble's viewpoint but not from both. However, the narrator of this passage tells us how they both felt. Dimble's effort not to hate Mark gives his face a fixed severity which Mark misinterprets as loathing.

"The whole of the rest of this conversation went on under this misunderstanding." (5)

The omniscient narrator would know this, of course, but Lewis might have learned it later by conferring with both men so we are not sure which narrator speaks here. The author has indeed complicated the viewpoint issue - as Isaac Asimov did at one point in the Foundation Trilogy when an "I" appeared unexpectedly in what had until then been the omniscient narrator's account of different modes of consciousness in the far future. In that case, one critic objected to the ambiguity in Asimov's narrative whereas I welcomed the extra layer of mystery presented by a narrator who, on the one hand, knew something about future mental powers but, on the other hand, admitted to the same level of ignorance as the readers about what it would be like to experience such powers.

There cannot be many parallels between works by CS Lewis and Ian Fleming. James Bond is Fleming's viewpoint character. However, one Fleming short story presents a bird's eye view of two converging figures crawling through long grass - towards a third party whom both intend to assassinate. This odd perspective is explained by the fact that three stories, including this one, were based on screen treatments for a proposed TV series.

Lewis the first person narrator came on stage on p. 136 of Out Of The Silent Planet, after Ransom had returned to Earth.

 "At this point, if I were guided by purely literary considerations, my story would end..." (6)

and:

"This is where I come into the story." (6)

We learn that Lewis has fictionalized the names of "Ransom" and "Weston" in order to publish as fiction an account that a very few readers will recognize as the truth. The postscript is "...extracts from a letter written by the original of 'Dr Ransom' to the author..." (7) In one extract, 'Ransom' addresses Lewis by name.

At the beginning of Perelandra, the first person narrator visits Ransom and is again addressed by name. 

"The Dark Tower" features Ransom, MacPhee and, as a first person narrator, an "Oxford man" who dislikes the nick-name "Lu-Lu" and who "...had been mixed up with..." Ransom's strange adventure described "...in another book..." and is indeed referred to as "Mr Lewis." (8)

"The Shoddy Lands" has a first person narrator visited in his college rooms at Oxford by a former student. 

The Great Divorce has a first person narrator who admired George MacDonald and is clearly Lewis. Here the story overlaps with that told in Lewis' spiritual biography Surprised By Joy.

Thus, whereas first person narrators are not usually identical with their author, in this case they are.

(1) CS Lewis, Out Of The Silent Planet IN The Cosmic Trilogy, London, 1990, pp. 1-144 AT p. 138.
(2) CS Lewis, That Hideous Strength IN The Cosmic Trilogy, London, 1990, pp. 349-753 AT p. 359.
(3) ibid., p. 719.
(4) ibid., p. 395.
(5) ibid., p. 578.
(6) Out Of The Silent Planet, p. 136.
(7) ibid., p. 139.
(8) CS Lewis, "The Dark Tower" IN The Dark Tower and other stories, London, 1983. pp. 17-91 AT pp. 17, 22, 29, 39.           

-copied from here.