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Lecture 17: He, She, & and It-Third Person Point of View

Lecture 17: He, She & It-Third Person of Point O View Repetitive Lecture by James Hynes again.

As mentioned in the last lecture, a first-person narration can be intimate and immediate, but first-person narrators can usually convey only those events that they have witnessed or heard about from another source. The third person, in contrast, has much more range and Rexibility. A third-person narration can encompass all sorts of things that a first person narrator wouldn't know or be able to express. Paradoxically, the third person can also go deeper into an individual character's consciousness than the first person. Perhaps most importantly, the third person is often a more instinctive and natural way to tell a story. In this lecture, we'll look at several varieties of third-person narration and see how they are combined by modern writers.

Closed Third Person
The close third person seems to be the default mode of most contemporary fiction. Here, the writer adopts the point of view of only one character at a time. This narration is similar to the first person because, on the whole, it stays close to what one character knows, thinks, and feels.

Still, the close third person contains at least the possibility of going deeper into the character's head than a first-person narration does because the third person allows the writer to reveal things about the character's thoughts, feelings, intentions, and prejudices that the character may not know or understand or may not want anybody else to know. In this respect, the close third person can be more comprehensive than the first person, because it allows the writer to show everything about a character, not just what that character chooses to reveal.

As with other choices in creative writing, using this point of view means that you gain some things and you lose others. With the first person, for example, you can create a unique voice for the character, as Twain does for Huck Finn, and by choosing to tell a story in the close third person, you lose that distinctive voice. In contrast in the closed third person you can deeply dive into the characters' minds as Virginia Woolf does in Mrs. Dalloway.

The Moment in Hucklebery Finn, where Huck decides to help Jim win his freedom—"Alright, then I'll go to hell." (Not currently talking at someone)——would  not be nearly as thrilling in the close third person because much of the scene's power comes from watching Huck work out the problem for himself.

By the same token, the scene in her book Mrs.  Dalloway where Clarissa looks into a shop window and her mind skips around with lightning speed would be clumsy in the first person. The intimate but slightly remote view afforded by the close third person allows us to understand Clarissa even better than she understands herself.

With the close third person, you also can switen trom one character to another with relative ease, avoiding the need to reinvent the voice of the narration each time. In other words, you can use the same authorial voice to evoke different characters.

The most bravura example of this, of course, is Mrs. Dalloway, which often switches point of view within a scene. In most instances, however, writers shift point of view from chapter to chapter. This technique broadens the scope of the story beyond what only one character can know.

Alternating points of view in the close third person is a powerful way to tell a long story because it gives you the best of both worlds: Each chapter allows you to inhabit the mind of a single character, but by changing the point of view, you can broaden the scope of the narrative and present different perspectives on the same events. At the most mechanical level, this technique ensures that the reader is present for all the important scenes.

You can add another dimension to the close third person by including the point-of-view character's first-person thoughts within the third person narration. A character's thoughts may be indicated by italics or quotation marks, although those treatments may not be appropriate in all cases.

Objective Third Person
In the objective or remote third person, the narration simply describes what the characters do and say without giving the reader access to their thoughts. At first glance, this narration might seem the same as the recording-eye first person, in which a character who is tangential to the main story relates the events. But there's a crucial difference: With the recording-eye first person, the events are still filtered through a fictional consciousness, who often passes judgment or makes educated guesses as to what the other characters are thinking.

Nick Carraway is not central to The Great Gatsby, but he views the story of Gatsby and Daisy from a particular point of view— as Daisy's cousin and Gatsby's friend and his take on the events of the novel colors the reader's understanding.

We can compare this with the remote third person narration in Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, which watches everything the characters do but doesn't give us direct access to their thoughts and feelings. This kind of third person keeps us at arm's length from its characters, which helps to build suspense but at the cost of a certain iciness.

The opposite of this remote and noncommittal third person is what we might call the engaged or judgmental third person, in which the narration has a strong opinion about the events it relates, even though that opinion doesn't come from an actual character in the story. This type of third-person narration is commonly found in the novels of the 18th and 19th centuries, when authors often passed judgment on the follies of their characters.

This kind of voice works especially well with comic or picaresque novels, such as Tom Jones, by the 18th-century English writer Henry Fielding.

A generation later, we hear a similar in Jane Austen, who seems to stand halfway between the warm-blooded, judgmental third person of the 18th century and the cooler but stillsympathetic close third person of the 20th century. Much of Pride and Prejudice is told in the closed third person from Elizabeth Bennet's point of view, but there are also memorable passages in which the author herself passes direct and unmediated judgment.

Perhaps the most enthusiastically judgmental narrator of all time is Charles Dickens, whose third-person narration often has great fun at the expense of his characters and doesn't shy away from stern moral outrage, especially at the injustices of society.

Modern writers are no less opinionated than their predecessors, but rather than telling the reader what to think, most contemporary novelists prefer to stand back and let the events of the novel and the actions and ideas of the characters speak for them.

-James Hynes
Ps. He's repetitive once again, Skylights-Lumna10.