Somehow, there’s always more to say about viewpoint. We did a series of posts as a detailed writeup on the major approaches to viewpoint, and we’ve talked about viewpoint sporadically in other posts. The topic even came up at some length in our review for The Rhetoric of Fiction, which may well alter the way you conceive of viewpoint entirely. It does away with the static, rigid categories embraced by your high school English teachers – first person, third person limited, third person omniscient – in favor of a complex, nuanced, and fluid approach to viewpoint. This is especially true of the very broad category of third person narrative, where instead of quantized levels of intimacy we have a continuum of intimacy with the viewpoint character to consider, from the very tight viewpoint of a very close third person limited, to the cinematic viewpoint of certain approaches to omniscient.
I come back to omniscient because I have seen so many examples of it done extraordinarily well. Frankly, I’m also a bit bored of third person limited. It’s become the standard in the last decade or two for genre fiction, especially adult genre fiction, and it is usually used like another version of first person, with “he” instead of “I.” There’s nothing wrong with that, and there is nuance to unpack, degrees to consider, and it can and does produce some excellent stories. When it becomes a default, though, something that we fall back on without thinking about it and deploy because it’s easy and we don’t have to be conscious and deliberate about it, we miss out on our ability to manipulate one of storytelling’s most powerful tools.
First person and third person limited are both supposed to be very “intimate” viewpoints, in the sense that the story is being told deeply embedded within a viewpoint character’s perspective. This means that author’s voice will often take a back seat in favor of character voice. Author’s voice is still present in stories told from these types of viewpoints, but it is subtler, an emergent phenomenon rather than something discretely observable in each moment of the text. The goal is for the author to be a kind of invisible medium through which the story is viewed. Omniscient is different, because it puts the author’s voice front and center. What often distinguishes the best omniscient stories is the distinctiveness of the narrative voice which is doing the storytelling. And there is the key – omniscient perspective is much more about telling a story than more intimate viewpoints. The narrator/author (the narrator’s perspective is not the same as the author’s perspective, but the narrator’s voice in an omniscient story will (usually) serve the same function as the literary technique we call author’s voice).
At some point, an omniscient viewpoint can actually bleed into first person. It might seem strange, but consider so many older stories told when omniscient was a more popular viewpoint. Most of Charles Dickens’ works are told from a third person omniscient perspective, where the narrator is a vocal, even intrusive presence in the story, influencing how it is presented and providing personal asides to the reader. He even uses the first person pronoun to refer to the narrator. Two main differences separate a first person story from an omniscient story told in a style like Dickens uses: whether or not the narrator is a character in the story’s action, and how much the narrator knows. If the narrator is also a character in the story’s action, involved in the plot in some way, then the story is arguably first person, not third person omniscient. And, if the narrator is limited to only knowing what a real character in the story could know, even if the narrator never appears or is involved in the story’s action, it’s probably not an omniscient viewpoint (yes, despite the name, omniscient viewpoints can vary in how much they actually “know”).
This is straightforward enough, until edge cases start cropping up to consider. Take epistolary stories and other framing mechanisms, for instance. For instance, there’s a story I want to write (tentatively called The Tantha Chronicles), which would detail the adventures of the travelling merchant Tantha from the perspective of her accountant. He would therefore be a character in the story, but I envision him recording the stories long after they happened, doing deep research and presenting the tale in much the style of an omniscient narrator. This is technically a first person approach, but it will read more like omniscient. I even intend that he would refer to his in-story self in the third person, while using the first person “I” for his narration. Alternatively, in Golems and Kings, there is no explicit reference to the narrator at all, and what separates it from being a third person limited presentation is that the narration freely jumps from character to character and place to place without changing perspective. The narrator is, then, implicit, but the line between this style and a third person limited approach with multiple perspectives is a fine one, and some early readers of finished chapters have been confused by the way the narration jumps from person to person, being accustomed to the way a third person limited presentation works.
These terms we use – first person, second person (please don’t use second person), third person limited, third person omniscient – are an easy shorthand to describe how we are choosing to approach narration in a given piece. The more I work with different approaches to viewpoint and storytelling, though, the more important I think it is that the description come after the choice of viewpoint. Our descriptors don’t capture enough of the options and choices possible in setting up the storytelling viewpoint for a given piece to be used as a menu of options from which to choose. Better, I think, to tell the story, and come up with the term to quickly describe the storytelling approach afterwards.
IGC Publishing 