Breaking Rules About Narrative Point of View in Fiction and Non-fiction · 10:54pm Oct 2nd, 2016
Here’s a question for all you clever writers who have studied literature, read books on how to write fiction, and enjoy correcting the rest of us about points of style:
Can you change the narrative point of view in the middle of a story?
I got thinking about this after reading a comment by Richard Preston in an interview in The New New Journalism. I’m interested in Preston because of the way he mixes fiction and non-fiction. His bestseller The Hot Zone is a science book about the Ebola virus, but is written in the style of a fictional thriller. He says: “I’ve discovered that you can get away with more in nonfiction than in fiction. For instance, one of the things I did in The Hot Zone that a novelist couldn’t get away with was changing the narrative point of view.”
In traditional popular science books, writers do this all the time. For example Smashing Physics, by Jon Butterworth (published as Most Wanted Particle in the US), begins as a second-person narrative, inviting the reader to imagine themselves driving a white van around CERN (in order to introduce the facility, convey a sense of the scale, and make some relevant points about centripetal force). He then switches to the first-person to tell a background story and describe the excitement on the day of the LHC start-up. Then to the third-person to talk about electromagnetism and what the engineers at CERN were up to. He switches tense frequently, as required. This is all standard science writing techniques, which no reader will find unusual. Indeed a science book written entire in one point of view would probably be regarded as rather dull.
But when writing fiction, it’s dangerously radical experimental stuff. Try doing it and you risk angering your teacher, failing your creative writing course, and being inundated by irritating comments from readers convinced that you don’t understand the concept of point-of-view and need them to explain it to you.
But Preston does it and it works. The Hot Zone opens with a conventional third-person narrative:
Charles Monet was a loner. He was a Frenchman who lived by himself in a little wooden bungalow on the private lands of the Nzoia Sugar Factory, a plantation in western Kenya…
Then within a few pages the tense and point of view changes:
You would not have been able to ignore the man who was being sick. He hunches over in his seat. There is something wrong with him, but you can’t tell exactly what is happening…
And it goes on. When I read this the first time, I didn’t notice this. But I was reading it as a science book, so I was partly admiring the unconventional style and the way it grabs the reader’s attention, but also raising an eyebrow at the sensationalist tone and wondering how accurate it is.
So would this work for conventional fiction? Is it, as Preston implies, the conservatism of editors and readers which prevents its adoption? Could a truly Great and Powerful writer violate conventions about point-of-view and get away with it?
Moving on to this week’s fun episode, P.P.O.V. (Pony Point of View) gives three stories of the same event from the point of view of three different characters: Rarity, Pinkie Pie, and Applejack, which each have a somewhat individual account of what happened. This is followed by an explanation of what really went on.
I understand this is a well-established literary device. It seems the term is the Rashomon Effect, but I await correction by the literati. In the world of literature, Laurence Durrell did it in The Alexandria Quartet. He claimed it was inspired by Einstein’s theory of relativity. Three stories displaced in space, one in time. As a physicist, I find this an interesting idea, but the mathematical connection seems tenuous (and the books aren’t all that great). There’s a rather clearer connection with the work of historians, who spend all their time dealing with contradictory accounts of past events. The best novel using this that I have read is: An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears.
However I imagine the inspiration for P.P.O.V. is probably something rather less high-prow. This is, after all, an experience familiar to any parents and teachers who have ever had to quiz three upset children, all with different accounts of what it was that reduced them to tears, and whose fault it was.
It also brings back vague personal memories of trying to learn to sail a dinghy, and the inevitable arguments about who was to blame after it capsized.
Harry Potter does it, no? The first chapter is told through Dumbledore's POV, while the rest is through Harry's. Unless you mean specifically within the middle of a passage, with no sort of break.
4237509
Yes, but that's not so radical, as it's just going from third-person-omniscient to third-person-limited, and there is a chapter break.
King did it in Christine, (1st, 3rd, 1st IIRC), and Brian Callison did something like that in A Flock of Ships. Both involved chapter breaks.
I've changed narrators mid-chapter, but not on anything on FimFiction as far as I can remember.
Changing point of views is usually jarring, breaking the suspension of disbelief by directly reminding the reader that they are reading. That doesn't matter in non-fiction, but in fiction it can destroy an otherwise wonderful work. If done well, it can be fun -- for example, switching back and forth between different characters at chapter breaks. But if a writer switches from first person, present tense to third person omniscient, past tense in the middle of a chapter, its unlikely to work well. And if you have an unreliable narrator, it's basically impossible to do without destroying the narrative. Remember, the purpose of a point of view in fiction is to control what the reader knows. In nonfiction, the author wants to convey as much information as possible; in fiction, an author needs to control the narrative.
Doesn't George R.R. Martin jump from one first person narrator to another basically in every chapter? I haven't read him, but that's the impression I've gotten.
Nothing is forbidden in fiction writing. The only real rule of writing, in my opinion, is "you're allowed to do anything, so long as you can make it work". The key point, though, is that changing the narrative POV has to serve the story, and that is a technical challenge that has to be met. Otherwise it will be just a mess.
It can work, but you must signal the POV change to the reader. He must always know who is viewing and acting.
My last story had a different primary perspective character every chapter, with a brief dip into third-person quasi-omiscient and a final chapter that went from third-person past tense to first-person present.
Granted, chapter breaks help a lot. Intrachapter perspective shifts can be very jarring if the reader isn't prepared for them.
English Literature professors may be against POV shifts but modern fiction writers do it all the time. I just finished V is for Vengeance by Sue Grafton and in it she switched from first person to third person and back again as necessary.
Again, my hypothetical English Literature professor may go up in spirals at this assertion, but it seems like you can break any "rule" you like while writing fiction as long as the narrative is consistently engaging and your rule-breaking isn't weird enough that it pulls the reader out of the story.
Hm. I've played with POV quite a bit, but I've never done one of any length from First person. The vast, vast majority of what I read is Third Person, Past Tense, so much so that a friend of mine is trying to write a Third Person, Persent Tense story and I just can't edit on it to save my life. I think one of the most dramatic (in multiple ways) POV shifts I've seen done are:
Third Person, Past : Just about anything done with Lois McMaster Bujold. She keeps a majority of the POV on a single character (Miles mostly) but has no problem shifting dialogue to a secondary character in order to make a scene more understandable.
First Person: Soon I Will Be Invincible. Seriously. I had to read it twice to catch all of the little pointers and twists, but it was well worth it.
I love The Hot Zone. I read it twice eons ago. I eventually convinced my wife to read it and was suitably creeped out.
A writer with the proper skill can do just about anything. Some readers might balk and scream "heeey that paragraph was two pages long and only contained three sentences!" but time will be the real judge. I can't recall the title, but I know there's a very successful novel that uses first person perspective from multiple characters. A million other authors would (and a few probably have) fall on their faces attempting to do that.
One problem:
Is that "perspective" and "point of view" aren't really the same thing. In a non-fiction work, the perspective is always the same: the author is telling you, the reader, about something that actually happened. The author can therefore change POVs all over the place because the consistent perspective will provide the reader with a consistent throughline.
But fiction and non-fiction are different because fiction has to make sense. In non-fiction, authors can get away with the most outrageous leaps of logic and common sense because they're just reporting actual events. And that's the common thread in all non-fiction: this stuff actually happened. In fiction, though, it's all lies and authors have to construct a consistent framework to help the reader suspend disbelief. You start jumping around too much and changing the rules halfway through, the readers are likely to get tired of playing, pick up their ball, and go home.
Some authors can make weird narrative stuff work. Frank Herbert in Dune, for instance, changes POV from paragraph to paragraph, sometimes from sentence to sentence. And yet, even me, a guy who gets thrown by POV shifts even when they happen between chapters, I was able to read Dune and if not enjoy it at least figure out who was doing what to whom.
Mike
So I was thinking some more, and I don't know if this helps, but . . .
I started reading a story once called Rule 34, and the author had multiple points of view, from chapter to chapter, and while they were clearly delineated, after a while it just got confusing, so I gave up on the book.
Likewise, that's given me trouble in Game of Thrones. There are too many characters, and too many things happen between each section, which makes it (for me) a challenging read.
Both A Flock of Ships and Christine had limited characters, and limited perspectives, which made it pretty easy to make the switch, 'cause you only had to do it a couple of times.
I guess the main bullet point is that unless you want to confuse your readers, think very carefully before you do something that might confuse your readers.
It's quite possible that Rashomon itself was the inspiration. It's a well-known movie in film classes, or so a friend of mine who has taken film classes tells me. The theme has also been used on a number of cartoons in the last 20 years.
In Rashomon, the differing stories were essentially unreconcilable. The woodcutter's tale at the end, which was likely mostly true, omitted a key element (a fancy knife, that he had stolen). Anyway, in this episode, the points of view were, in my opinion, easily reconcilable with very little effort, Twilight's protestations notwithstanding. This is understandable: in Rashomon, all of the tale tellers had ulterior motives to either try and make themselves look good or get revenge on one of the other parties (or possibly protect one of the other parties...there's some ambiguity). Here, it was an honest difference of perspective, exaggerated only by Rarity's flare for drama, Pinkie Pie's... whatever... and Applejack's general perception that she's the only sane mare in the trio.
Julian Barnes' novels--I haven't read them, but I've tried to cluster them in stylo--are told by a first-person narrator about how he investigated some real-life person (eg Flaubert) from the past. He has large sections in first person and large sections in third person, both of which alternate between past and present tense. Typically, he starts off with a narrator talking about himself in the present, then reflecting on himself in the past, then talking in the past tense about someone from the distant past, and then he may shift into present tense while still talking about that person in the past. Then he pops back up all the way to first-person present tense by the end of the novel.