Point of view is the position from which a narrative is told — who sees, who speaks, and what access the reader has to characters’ thoughts and perceptions. It is among the most consequential choices a fiction writer makes, because it determines what the reader can know and how they know it.
The primary categories are:
- First person — the narrator is a character in the story, using “I.” The reader has access to the narrator’s thoughts but is limited to the narrator’s perception. What the narrator doesn’t know, the reader doesn’t know. What the narrator misunderstands, the reader must detect through other cues.
- Third person limited — the narrator is outside the story but filters perception through one character at a time. The reader sees the world as that character sees it, but the narrator can report it in language the character wouldn’t use.
- Third person omniscient — the narrator can enter any character’s mind and knows things no character knows. George Eliot’s narrators comment on society, history, and psychology beyond any character’s awareness.
- Second person — the narrator addresses the reader as “you,” which can create immediacy or estrangement depending on whether the reader accepts the identification.
Gérard Genette refined point of view into two distinct concepts: voice (who speaks?) and focalization (who sees?) [@genette1980]. A story can be narrated by one character but focalized through another — the narrator tells us what someone else perceives. This distinction clarifies cases that the traditional categories blur: a first-person narrator recounting events they didn’t witness, or an omniscient narrator who temporarily restricts perception to one character’s viewpoint.
Wayne Booth added a further dimension: the reliability of the narrator. A reliable narrator’s account can be taken at face value; an unreliable narrator’s account must be read against itself — the reader must infer what actually happened from the gap between what the narrator says and what the text implies [@booth1961].
Related terms
- narrator — the voice that tells the story, whose relationship to point of view is direct
- character — point of view determines the reader’s access to character interiority
- scene — point of view governs how scenes are experienced
- show don’t tell — point of view constrains what can be shown versus told