THE POINT OF VIEW IN NARRATIVE
We have now examined in detail the elements of narrative, and must
next consider the various points of view from which they may be seen
and, in consequence, be represented. Granted a given series of events
to be set forth, the structure of the plot, the means of character
delineation, the use of setting, the entire tone and tenor of the
narrative, are all dependent directly on the answer to the question,
Who shall tell the story?
For a given train of incidents is differently seen and judged,
according to the standpoint from which it is observed. The evidence in
most important murder trials consists mainly of successive narratives
told by different witnesses; and it is very interesting to notice, in
comparing them, how very different a tone and tenor is given to the
same event by each of the observers who recounts it. It remains for
the jury to determine, if possible, from a comparison of the various
views of the various witnesses, what it was that actually happened.
But this, in many cases, is extremely difficult. One witness saw the
action in one way, another in another; one formed a certain
judgment of the character of the accused, another formed a judgment
diametrically different; each has his separate sense of the train
of causation that culminated in the act; the accused himself would
disagree with all the witnesses, if indeed he were capable of looking
on the facts without conscious or unconscious self-deception; and we
may be certain that an infallible omniscient mind, cognizant of all
the hidden motives, would see the matter differently still. The
task of the jury is, in the main, to induce from all these tragic
inconsistencies an absolute outlook upon the real truth that underlies
the facts so differently seen and so variously judged.
Such an absolute outlook is hardly possible to the finite mind of man;
and though it is often assumed by the writer of fiction in the telling
of his tale, it can seldom be consistently maintained. It is therefore
safer to acknowledge that the absolute truth of a story, whether
actual or fictitious, can never be entirely told; that the same train
of incidents looks different from different points of view; and that
therefore the various points of view from which any story may be
looked upon should be studied carefully for the purpose of determining
from which of them it is possible, in a given case, to approach most
nearly a clear vision of the truth.
The points of view from which a story may be seen and told are
many and various; but they may all be grouped into two classes, the
internal and the external. A story seen internally is narrated in the
first person by one of its participants; a story seen externally is
narrated in the third person by a mind aloof from the events depicted.
There are, of course, many variations, both of the internal and of
the external point of view. These in turn must be examined, for the
purpose of determining the special advantages and disadvantages of
each.
First of all, a story may be told by the leading actor in its series
of events,--the hero, as in "Henry Esmond," or the heroine, as in
"Jane Eyre." This point of view is of especial value in narratives
in which the element of action is predominant. The multifarious
adventures of Gil Blas sound at once more vivid and more plausible
narrated in the first person than they would sound narrated in the
third. When what is done is either strange or striking, we prefer
to be told about it by the very man who did it. "Treasure Island" is
narrated by Jim Hawkins, "Kidnapped" by David Balfour; and much of the
vividness of these exciting tales depends upon the fact that they
are told in each case by a boy who stood ever in the forefront of
the action. The plausibility of "Robinson Crusoe" is increased by the
convention that the hero is narrating his own personal experience:
in fact Defoe, in all his fictions, preferred to write in the first
person, because what he sought primarily was plausibility of tone.
This point of view is also of supreme advantage in recounting
personal emotion. Consider for a moment the following paragraph from
"Kidnapped" (Chapter X):--
"I do not know if I was what you call afraid; but my heart beat like a
bird's, both quick and little; and there was a dimness came before my
eyes which I continually rubbed away, and which continually returned.
As for hope, I had none; but only a darkness of despair and a sort of
anger against all the world that made me long to sell my life as dear
as I was able. I tried to pray, I remember, but that same hurry of my
mind, like a man running, would not suffer me to think upon the words;
and my chief wish was to have the thing begin and be done with it."
Now, for the sake of experiment, let us go through the passage,
substituting the pronoun "he" for the pronoun "I." Thus:--
"He was hardly what is called afraid; but his heart beat like a
bird's, both quick and little; and there was a dimness came before his
eyes which he continually rubbed away, and which continually returned.
As for hope, he had none ..." and so forth. Notice how much vividness
is lost,--how much immediacy of emotion. The zest and tang of the
experience is sacrificed, because the reader is forced to stand aloof
and observe it from afar.
The point of view of the leading actor makes for vividness in still
another way. It necessitates an absolute concreteness and objectivity
in the delineation of the subsidiary characters. On the other hand, it
precludes analysis of their emotions and their thoughts. The hero can
tell us only what they said and did, how they looked in action and in
speech, and what they seemed to him to think and feel. But he cannot
enter their minds and delve among their motives. Furthermore he
cannot, without sacrificing naturalness of mood, analyze to any great
extent his own mental processes. Consequently it is almost impossible
to tell from the hero's point of view a story in which the main events
are mental or subjective. We can hardly imagine George Eliot writing
in the first person: the "psychological novel" demands the third.
But the chief difficulty in telling a story from the leading actor's
point of view is the difficulty of characterizing the narrator. All
means of direct delineation are taken from him. He cannot write essays
on his merits or his faults; he can neither describe nor analyze
himself; he cannot see himself as others see him. We must derive our
sense of who and what he is, solely from the things he does and says,
and from his manner of telling us about them. And although it is not
especially difficult, within a brief compass, to delineate a character
through his way of telling things [Notice Laughton O. Zigler, in Mr.
Kipling's "The Captive," whose speech has been examined in a former
chapter], it is extremely difficult to maintain this expedient
consistently throughout a lengthy novel.
Furthermore, an extended story can be told only by a person with a
well-trained sense of narrative; and it is often hard to concede to
the hero the narrative ability that he displays. How is it, we may
ask, that Jim Hawkins is capable of such masterly description as that
of "the brown old seaman, with the sabre cut," in the second paragraph
of "Treasure Island"? How is it that David Balfour, an untutored boy,
is capable of writing the rhythmic prose of Robert Louis Stevenson,
master of style? And in many cases it is also difficult to concede to
the hero an adequate motive for telling his own story. Why is it that,
in the sequel to "Kidnapped," David Balfour should write out all the
intimate details of his love for Catriona? And how is it conceivable
that Jane Eyre should tell to any one, and least of all to the general
public, the profound privacies of emotion evoked by her relation with
Mr. Rochester?
The answer is, of course, that such violations of the hard terms of
actuality are justified by literary convention; and that if the gain
in vividness be great enough, the reader will be willing to concede,
first, that the story shall be told by the leading actor, regardless
of motive, and second, that he shall be granted the requisite mastery
of narrative. But the fact remains that it is very hard for the hero
to draw his own character except in outline; and therefore if the
emphasis is to lie less on what he does than on the sort of person
that he is, the expedient will be ineffectual.
The main structural advantage of telling the story through the person
of the hero is that his presence as the central figure in every event
narrated makes for coherence and gives the story unity. But attendant
disadvantages are that it is often difficult to account for the hero's
presence in every scene, that he cannot be an eye-witness to events
happening at the same time in different places, and that it is hard to
account for his possession of knowledge regarding those details of
the plot which have no immediate bearing on himself. It seems always
somewhat lame to state, as heroes telling their own stories are
frequently obliged to do, "These things I did not know at the time,
and found out only afterwards; but I insert them here, because it is
at this point in the plot that they belong."
Many of these disadvantages may be overcome by telling the tale
from the point of view, not of the leading actor, but of some minor
personage in the story. In this case again, analysis of character is
precluded; but the narrator may delineate the leading actor directly,
through descriptive and expository comment. In stories where the hero
is an extraordinary person, and could not without immodesty descant
upon his own unusual capabilities, it is of obvious advantage to
represent him from the point of view of an admiring friend. Thus when
Poe invented the detective story, he wisely decided to exhibit the
extraordinary analytic power of Dupin through a narrative told not by
the detective himself but by a man who knew him well; and Dr. A. Conan
Doyle, following in his footsteps, has invented Dr. Watson to tell the
tales of Sherlock Holmes.
The actual instance of Boswell and Johnson substantiates the
possibility of a minor actor's knowing intimately all phases of
a hero's life and character. And since the point of view of the
secondary personage is just as internal to the events themselves as
that of the leading actor, the story may be told with an immediacy, a
vividness, and a plausibility approximating closely the effect derived
from a narrative told by the hero. And there is now less difficulty
in accounting for the narrator's knowledge of all the details of the
plot. He can witness minor necessary scenes at which the hero is not
present; he can know things (and tell them to the reader) which at the
time the hero did not know; and if his presence be withheld from an
important incident, the hero can narrate it to him afterward.
Nevertheless, it is often very difficult to maintain throughout a long
story the point of view of a minor actor in the plot. Thackeray breaks
down completely in his attempt to tell "The Newcomes" from the point
of view of Arthur Pendennis, the hero of a former novel. Stevenson
assigns to Mackellar the task of narrating "The Master of Ballantrae":
but when the Master disappears and Mackellar remains at home with Mr.
Henry, it is necessary for the author to invent a second personage,
the Chevalier de Burke, to tell the story of the Master's wanderings.
This last instance leads us to consider the possibility of telling
different sections of the story from the points of view of different
characters, assigning to each the particular phase of the narrative
that he is especially fitted to recount. Three quarters of the
"Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" is narrated in the third
person, externally; but the final intimate vividness of horror is
gained by shifting to an internal point of view for the two concluding
chapters,--the first written by Dr. Lanyon, and the last by Jekyll
himself. Mr. Kipling has developed to very subtle uses the expedient
of opening a story from the point of view of a narrator who is named
simply "I" and who is not characterized in any way at all, and then
letting the story proper be told to this impersonal narrator by
several characters who are clearly delineated through their speech
and through the parts that they have played in the tale that they
are telling. This device is used in nearly all the stories of the
"Soldiers Three." The narrator meets Mulvaney, Ortheris, and Learoyd
under certain circumstances, and gathers from them bit by bit the
various features of the story,--one detail being contributed by one of
the actors, another by another, until out of the successive fragments
the story is built up. It is in this way also, as we have already
noted, that the tale of Mrs. Bathurst is set before the reader.
A convenient means of shifting the burden of the narrative at any
point to a certain special character is to introduce a letter written
by that character to one of the other people in the plot. This
expedient is employed with extraordinary cleverness by Mr. Meredith in
"Evan Harrington." Most of the tale is told externally; but every now
and then the clever and witty Countess de Saldar writes a letter in
which a leading incident is illuminated from her personal point of
view.
Ever since the days of Richardson the device has frequently been used
of telling an entire story through a series of letters exchanged among
the characters. The main advantage of this method is the constant
shifting of the point of view, which makes it possible for the reader
to see every important incident through the eyes of each of the
characters in turn. Furthermore, it is comparatively easy to
characterize in the first person when the thing that is written is so
intimate and personal as a letter. But the disadvantage of the device
lies in the fact that it tends toward incoherence in the structure
of the narrative. It is hard for the author to stick to the point at
every moment without violating the casual and discursive tone that the
epistolary style demands.
Of course a certain unity may be gained if the letters used are all
written by a single character. The chief advantage of this method over
a direct narrative written by one of the actors is the added motive
for the revelation of intimate matters which is furnished by the fact
that the narrator is writing, not for the public at large, but only
for the friend, or friends, to whom the letters are addressed. But a
series of letters written by one person only is very likely to become
monotonous; and more is usually gained than lost by assigning the
epistolary role successively to different characters.
We have seen that, although the employment of an internal point of
view gives a narrative vividness of action objectivity of observation,
immediacy of emotion, and plausibility of tone, it is attended by
several difficulties in the delineation of the characters and the
construction of the plot. It is therefore in many cases more advisable
for the author to look upon the narrative externally and to write it
in the third person. But there are several different ways of doing
this; for though a story viewed externally is told in every case by
a mind distinct from that of any of the characters, there are many
different stations in which that mind may set itself, and many
different moods in which it may recount the story.
First of all (to start with a phase that contrasts most widely
with the internal point of view) the external mind may set itself
equidistant from all the characters and may assume toward them an
attitude of absolute omniscience. The story, in such a case, is told
by a sort of god, who is cognizant of the past and future of the
action while he is looking at the present, and who sees into the minds
and hearts of all the characters at once and understands them better
than they do themselves.
The main practical advantage in assuming the god-like point of view
is that the narrator is never obliged to account for his possession of
intimate information. He can observe events which happen at the same
time in places widely separated. Darkness cannot dim his eyes; locked
doors cannot shut him out. He can be with a character when that
character is most alone. He can make clear to us the thoughts that
do not tremble into speech, the emotions that falter and subside into
inaction. He can know, and can convey to us, how much of a person's
real thought is expressed, and how much is concealed, by the language
that he uses. And the reader seeks no motive to account for the
narrator's revelation of the personal secrets of the characters.
The omniscient point of view is the only one that permits upon a
large scale the depiction of character through mental analysis. It is
therefore usually used in the "psychological novel." It was employed
always by George Eliot, and has been selected almost always by Mr.
Meredith. It is, of course, invaluable for telling the sort of story
whose main events are mental, or subjective. A spiritual experience
which does not translate itself into concrete action can be viewed
adequately only from the god-like point of view. But when it is
employed in the narration of objective events, the writer runs the
danger of undue abstractness. A certain vividness--a certain immediacy
of observation--are likely to be lost, because of the aloofness from
the characters of the mind that sees them.
This point of view is at once the most easy and the most difficult
that the author may assume. Technically it is the easiest, because the
writer is absolutely free in the selection and the patterning of his
narrative materials: but humanly it is the most difficult, because it
is hard for any man consistently to play the god, even toward his own
fictitious creatures. Although George Eliot assumes omniscience of
Daniel Deronda, the consensus of opinion among men of sound judgment
is that she does not really know her hero. Deronda is in truth a
lesser person than she thinks him; and her assumption of omniscience
breaks down. In fact, unless an author is gifted with the god-like
wisdom of Mr. Meredith, he is almost sure to break down in the
effort to sustain the omniscient attitude consistently throughout a
complicated novel.
Therefore, in assuming a point of view external to the characters, it
is usually wiser for the author to accept a compromise and to
impose certain definite limits upon his own omniscience. Thus, while
maintaining the prerogative to enter at any moment the minds of one or
more of his characters, he may limit his observation of the others to
what was actually seen and heard of them by those of whose minds he is
omniscient. In such a case, although the author tells the story in the
third person, he virtually sees the story from the point of view of
a certain actor, or of certain actors, in it. The only phase of
this device which we need to examine is that wherein the novelist's
omniscience is limited to a single character.
This special point of view is employed with consummate art by Jane
Austen. In "Emma," for example, she portrays every intimate detail of
the heroine's thoughts and feelings, entering Emma's mind at will, or
looking at her from the outside with omniscient eyes. But in dealing
with the other characters, the author limits her own knowledge to what
Emma knew about them, and sees them consistently through the eyes of
the heroine. Hence the story, although written by Jane Austen in the
third person, is really seen by Emma Woodhouse and thought of in the
first. Similarly, in "Pride and Prejudice," Elizabeth Bennet is the
only character that the author permits herself to analyze at any
length: the others are seen objectively, merely as Elizabeth saw them.
The reader is made acquainted with every step in the heroine's gradual
change of feeling toward Mr. Darcy; but of the change in Darcy's
thoughts and feelings toward Elizabeth the reader is told nothing
until she herself discovers it.
Of course, in applying this device, it is possible for the author, at
certain points in the narrative, to shift his limited omniscience from
one of the characters to another. In such a case, although the story
is told throughout consistently in the third person, one scene may be
viewed from the standpoint of one of the characters, another from that
of another character, and so on.
Imagine for a moment two adjacent rooms with a single door between
them which is locked; and suppose a character alone in each of the
rooms,--each person thinking of the other. Now an author assuming
absolute omniscience could tell us what each of them was thinking at
the self-same moment: the locked door would not be a bar to him. But
an author telling the story from the attitude of limited omniscience
could tell us only what one of them was thinking, and would not be
able to see beyond the door. Whether or not he would find himself at
liberty to choose which room he should be cognizant of, would depend
of course on whether he was maintaining the same point of view
throughout his story or was selecting it anew for every scene. In the
first case, the one character whom he could see would be determined in
advance: in the other, he should have to decide from the point of view
of which of them that special scene could be the more effectively set
forth.
The attitude of limited omniscience is more easy to maintain than that
of a god-like mind intimately cognizant of all the characters at once;
and furthermore, the employment of the more restricted point of view
is more likely to produce the illusion of life. In actual experience,
we see only one mind internally,--our own; all other people we look
upon externally: and a story, therefore, which lays bare to us one
mind and only one is more in tune with life itself than a story in
which many minds are searched by an all-seeing eye. Also, a story told
in the third person from the point of view which has been illustrated
from Jane Austen's novels enjoys nearly every advantage of a
narrative told in the first person by the leading actor, without being
encumbered by certain of the most noticeable disadvantages.
For the sake of concreteness, however, it is often advisable for the
author writing in the third person to restrict his point of view still
further, and, foregoing absolutely the prerogative of omniscience, to
limit himself to an attitude merely observant and entirely external
to all the characters. In such a case the author wears, as it were,
an invisible cap like that of Fortunatus, which permits him to move
unnoticed among his characters; and he reports to us externally their
looks, their actions, and their speech, without ever assuming an
ability to delve into their minds. This rigidly external point of view
is employed frequently by Guy de Maupassant in his briefer fictions;
but although it is especially valuable in the short story, it is
extremely difficult to maintain through the extensive compass of
a novel. The main advantage of this point of view is that it
necessitates upon the part of the author an attitude toward his story
which is at all moments visual rather than intellectual. He does not
give a ready-made interpretation of his incidents, but merely projects
them before the eyes of his readers and allows to each the privilege
of interpreting them for himself. But, on the other hand, the reader
loses the advantage of the novelist's superior knowledge of his
creatures; and, excepting in dramatic moments when the motives are
self-evident from the action, may miss the human purport of the scene.
In employing every phase of the external point of view except the one
which has been last discussed, the author is free to choose between
two very different tones of narrative,--the impersonal and the
personal. He may either obliterate or emphasize his own personality
as a factor in the story. The great epics and folk-tales have all been
told impersonally. Whatever sort of person Homer may have been, he
never obtrudes himself into his narrative; and we may read both the
"Iliad" and the "Odyssey" without deriving any more definite sense of
his personality than may be drawn from the hints which are given us by
the things he knows about. No one knows the author of "Beowulf" or of
the "Nibelungen Lied." These stories seem to tell themselves. They are
seen from nobody's point of view, or from anybody's--whichever way
we choose to say it. Many modern authors, like Sir Walter Scott,
instinctively assume the epic attitude toward their characters and
incidents: they look upon them with a large unconsciousness of self
and depict them just as any one would see them. Other authors, like
Mr. William Dean Howells, strive deliberately to keep the personal
note out of their stories: self-consciously they triumph over self in
the endeavor to leave their characters alone.
But novelists of another class prefer to admit frankly to the reader
that the narrator who stands apart from all the characters and writes
about them in the third person is the author himself. They give a
personal tone to the narrative; they assert their own peculiarities
of taste and judgment, and never let you forget that they, and they
alone, are telling the story. The reader has to see it through their
eyes. It is in this way, for example, that Thackeray displays his
stories,--pitying his characters, admiring them, making fun of them,
or loving them, and never letting slip an opportunity to chat about
the matter with his readers.
Mr. Howells, in Section XV of his "Criticism and Fiction," comments
adversely on Thackeray's tendency "to stand about in his scene,
talking it over with his hands in his pockets, interrupting the
action, and spoiling the illusion in which alone the truth of art
resides"; and in a further sentence he condemns him as "a writer who
had so little artistic sensibility, that he never hesitated on any
occasion, great or small, to make a foray among his characters, and
catch them up to show them to the reader and tell him how beautiful
or ugly they were; and cry out over their amazing properties."
This sweeping condemnation of the narrative attitude of one of the
best-beloved of the great masters sounds just a little bigoted. It is
true, of course, that the strictest artists in fiction, like Guy de
Maupassant, prefer to tell their tales impersonally: they leave their
characters rigidly alone, and allow the reader to see them without
looking through the author's personality. But there is a type of
literature wherein the chief charm for the reader lies in the fact
that he is permitted to see things through the author's mind. When we
read Charles Lamb's essay on "The South Sea House," we read it not so
much to look at the deserted and memorable building as to look at Elia
looking at it. Similarly many readers return again and again to "The
Newcomes" not so much for the pleasure of seeing London high society
as for the pleasure of seeing Thackeray see it. The merit, or the
defect, of the method in any case is a question not of rules and
regulations but of the tone and quality of the author's mind. Whether
or not he may safely obtrude himself into his fictions depends
entirely on who he is. This is a matter more of personality than of
art: and what might be insufferable with one author may stand as the
main merit of another. For instance, the greatest charm of Mr. J. M.
Barrie's novels emanates from the author's habit of emphasizing the
personal relation between himself and his characters. The author's
many-mooded attitude toward Sentimental Tommy is a matter of human
interest just as much as anything that Tommy feels himself.
Let us admit, then, in spite of Mr. Howells, that the author of
fiction has a right to assert himself as the narrator, provided that
he be a person of interest and charm. It remains for us to consider
the various moods in which, in such a case, the writer may look upon
his story. The self-obliterating author endeavors to hide his own
opinion of the characters, in order not to interfere with the reader's
independence of judgment concerning them; but the author who writes
personally does not hesitate to reveal, nor even to express directly,
his admiration of a character's merits or his deprecation of a
character's defects. You will seek in vain, in studying the fictitious
people of Guy de Maupassant, for any indication of the author's
approval or disapproval of them; and there is something very admirable
in this absolute impassiveness of art. But on the other hand, there
is a certain salutary humanness about an author who loves or hates his
characters just as he would love or hate the same sort of people in
actual life, and writes about them with the glow of personal emotion.
Mr. Barrie often disapproves of Tommy; sometimes he feels forced to
scold him; but he loves him for a' that: and we feel instinctively
that the hero is the more truthfully delineated for being represented
by a friend.
It will be gathered from the foregoing discussion of the various
points of view in narrative that no one of them may be pronounced
absolutely better than the others. But this much may be said
dogmatically:--there is always one best point of view from which
to tell any given short-story; and although in planning a novel the
author works with far less technical restriction, there is almost
always one best point of view from which to tell a given novel.
Therefore, it is advisable for the author to determine as early as
possible, from a studious consideration of his materials, what is the
best point of view from which to tell the story he is planning, and
thereafter to contemplate his narrative from that standpoint and that
only. Furthermore, the interest of art demands that the point of view
selected shall, if possible, be maintained consistently throughout the
telling of the story. This, however, is a very difficult matter; and
only in very recent years have even the best writers grown to master
it. The novels which have been told without a single violation of
this principle are very few in number. But the fact remains that any
unwarrantable break-down in the point of view selected diseconomizes
the attention of the reader. It is unfortunate, for instance, that
Thomas Bailey Aldrich, in "Marjorie Daw," should have found it
necessary, after telling almost the entire tale in letters, to shift
suddenly to the external point of view and end the story with a few
pages of direct narrative. Such an unexpected variation of method
startles and to some extent disrupts the attention of the reader, and
thereby detracts from the effect of the thing to be conveyed.
Mr. Henry James and Mr. Kipling exhibit, in their several ways,
extraordinary mastery of point of view; and their works may very
profitably be studied for examples of this special phase of artistry
in narrative. The very title of Mr. James' "What Maisie Knew"
proclaims the rigidly restricted standpoint from which the narrative
material is seen. In Mr. Kipling's recent tale, "A Deal in Cotton,"
which appeared in _Collier's Weekly_ for Christmas, 1907, the interest
is derived chiefly from the trick of telling the story twice,--first
from the point of view of Adam Strickland, and the second time from
the point of view of Adam's native body-servant, who knew many matters
that were hidden from his master.
In certain special cases the point of view has been made, so to speak,
the real hero of the story. Some years ago Mr. Brander Matthews,
in collaboration with the late H. C. Bunner, devised a very clever
narrative entitled "The Documents in the Case." It consisted merely of
a series of numbered documents, widely different in nature, presented
with neither introduction nor comment by the authors. The series
contained clippings from various newspapers, personal letters,
I. O. U's, race-track reports, pawn-tickets, letter-heads, telegrams,
theater programs, advertisements, receipted bills, envelopes, etc. In
spite of the diversity of these materials, the authors succeeded in
fabricating a narrative which was entirely coherent and at all points
clear. The main interest, however, lay in the novelty and cleverness
of the point of view; and though such an exaggerated technical
expedient may be serviceable now and then for a special sort of
story, it is not of any general value. A point of view that attracts
attention to itself necessarily distracts attention from the story
that is being represented; and in a narrative of serious import, the
main emphasis should be thrown upon the thing that is told rather than
upon the way of telling it.