Point of view

The vantage point from which a narrative is told. There are two basic points of view: first-person and third-person. In the first-person point of view, the story is told by one of the characters in his/her own words. The first-person point of view is limited, since the reader is told only what this character knows and observes. Here is an example of first point of view from Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels:The king was struck with horror at the description I had given of those terrible engines, and the proposal I had made. He was amazed how so important and groveling an insect as I (these were his expressions) could entertain such inhuman ideas…In the third-person point of view, the narrator is not a character in the story. The narrator may be an omniscient, or “all-knowing,” observer who can describe and comment on all the characters and actions in the story. Thomas Hardy’s “ The Three Strangers” is written from a third-person omniscient point of view:Shepherdess Fennel fell back upon the intermediate plan of mingling short dances with short periods of talk and singing, so as to hinder any ungovernable rage in either.On the other hand, the third-person narrator might tell a story from the point of view of only one character in the story, as Virginia Woolf does in the “The New Dress.” All the action in that story is told by the third-person narrator, from the limited point of view of Mable Warning.