'Catch me if you can' - Point of View as Characterisation in Fiction I

Virginia Woolf once famously wrote that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed.’[1] Her deliberately provocative - yet apparently glib - remark grounded the shifts in ‘human relations’ reflected in fiction in the historical realities of the early twentieth-century and contextualised ‘what novelists mean when they talk about character.’[2] Woolf’s essay is an extended discussion of the treatment of character and ‘reality’ in novels of the preceding two centuries, as well as an appeal for a renewed focus on character (rather than on what she calls the ‘fabric of things’).  What interests me is that Woolf argues the form of the novel has specifically evolved to ‘express character’ and how methods and techniques, such as narrative point of view, are used in the service of that expression.

Through my own developing practice as a writer, I have begun to explore how character ‘works’ in fiction.  What narrative techniques can be called upon to develop and orchestrate, or ‘catch,’ character? Which devices best serve the writer who wishes to make character the central focus of their fictions – as opposed to, say, ideas, arguments or beliefs?  

As writers, we might choose to present character through how they look, what they wear, how they sound and talk, why, when and to whom – as well as what they choose to say.  Voice, style, detail also contribute to the portrayal of character. Characters are revealed in action, are capable of making action happen as well as responding to it. Indeed, the action of most novels is driven by character in conflict – be that conflict between characters or between a lead character and the various obstacles in the way of achieving their goals and desires.[3]

Fiction also has the unique ability to tell us about character through the representation of their thoughts and reflections. We can enter a character’s mind and share in the train of thought that might lead them to this or that action, to speak in such and such a way, to have this or that epiphany. Aristotle wrote that thought is the process by which character determines the action needed to achieve their ultimate goal.[4] In fiction, such thought can be presented in a number of ways – directly, indirectly, through summary – and the degree to which that thought is revealed is determined through narrative point of view.

‘Perspective,’ from the Latin for ‘to look through’ first meant an optical glass or telescope in English.[5] The narrative perspective is this lens or eye – and, by extension, the mind behind the eye – through which a story is told.  As Paul Magrs puts it:

Every piece of writing comes from a particular point of view. Choices have to be made as to who is writing and from where. One of the things to be clear about, from the very start, is that you are adopting a specific and consistent point of view and that you are doing it for a reason … Who is telling us this story? … What can they see? What can they know?[6]

In first-person narratives – those written using the personal pronoun ‘I’ –  point of view is allied to that of the narrator, who is also a character.  Reliable or unreliable, at the heart of the action or in the margins, we can only see or know what they see or know: the world of the story is contained within their perspective.  Similarly, in (rarely used) second-person narratives, point of view is restricted to the narrator who addresses ‘you,’ the reader-as-character.

Third person narratives, however, can be more or less distant from the point of view of a particular character in the story, or even entirely outside of character. The classic typology of third person point of view goes something like this:

Omniscient	Narrator is ‘God-like’ in their panoramic view of the fictional world. They can move in and out of character(s), interpret characters’ appearance, speech, actions, thoughts; move freely in time and space – tell us what happened elsewhere, in the past or what will happen in the future; provide general judgements, reflections and truths. The omniscient voice is not embodied in any one character.  It is often found in the classic narrative voice of Charles Dickens, George Eliot and other nineteenth-century (social) realists.
Limited Omniscient or Close Third Person	Narrator is more closely bound up in the action of the novel with a more deliberately limited omniscience.  Point of view may be restricted to a single character or group of characters; language and word choice may reflect that of the central character and yet there remains a gap between the narrator and character/action. Jane Austen’s work is an oft-cited example of limited omniscience.  It is also used frequently in contemporary fiction.  James Wood has called this close third-person perspective ‘free indirect style’ – a description to which I’ll return later in these blog posts.[7]
Objective Author	Narrator restricted to recording external facts grounded in sight, touch, taste, sound and smell; similar in point of view to a bystander or witness of events unfolding before them. There are no direct revelations about characters or comments on the action. Hemingway’s short story ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ reports what is said and done by an arguing couple using the objective author’s perspective.[8]

I’m particularly interested in how narrative point of view augments and strengthens our sense of character, how it exposes and choreographs action and thought.  As the above typology suggests, in third-person fictions character is not reducible to narrator – they are not necessarily one and the same thing. And yet, this method of narrating story has the ability to develop character in complex, subtle and sophisticated ways. [9] So how does this work, and what can I learn from it as a writer? It seems to me that understanding this dynamic is critical to my own developing practice. While first person narration builds (and locks us into) character through the use of a direct voice, the sharing of experiences, thoughts and reflections ‘at source,’ third person inevitably does the work of characterisation in different ways. In the next blog post, I'll be focusing particularly on examples of omniscient and limited omniscient point of view as characterisation in a range of examples from fiction to try to grasp how this might work.

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[1] Virginia Woolf ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,’ in Collected Essays.  Ed. Leonard Woolf., Vol. 1 (London: Hogarth, 1966), pp. 319-337.  4 vols. 1966-67. ‘Catch me if you can’ – the phrase used in the title of this essay, is taken from Woolf’s piece.

[2] Ibid.

[3] For an extended discussion on these ‘direct’ methods of characterisation (appearance, action, dialogue, thought), see Janet Burroway & Elizabeth Stuckey-French Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft Seventh Edition (London: Longman, 2007), pp.80-136.

[4] Aristotle Ars Poetica Trans. Penelope Murray, (London: Penguin Classics, 2004).

[5] Northrop Frye et al eds., The Practical Imagination (London: Harper Collins, 1987), p.1412.

[6] Paul Magrs ‘Point of View,’ in Julia Bell & Paul Magrs, Eds., The Creative Writing Coursebook: Forty Authors Share Advice and Exercises for Fiction and Poetry (London: Macmillan, 2001), p.135.

[7] See James Wood How Fiction Works (London: Vintage, 2008).

[8] See Burroway & Stuckey-French, op. cit., p.299 for discussion.

[9] For an extended discussion of the differences between ‘agency’ and point of view, see Steven Cohan & Linda M. Shires Telling Stories: A Theoretical Analysis of Narrative Fiction (London & New York: Routledge, 1988), pp.83-112.