Point of View Technique in Short Story

If you read a piece of literature, you'll find the story narrated or told from a point of view technique. The story is either narrated in omniscient, first person, or central intelligence point of view. The reader is taken into the story by the narrator by means of one of these point of view techniques.

Point of view is an inevitable part of a story. In this article, you will learn about the various types of this device and how they play an important role in the story.

There are basically three types of point-of-view techniques:

1. Omniscient

The all-knowing author, that means omniscient, narrates the story. The narrator relates what he wishes to relate about the feelings, emotions, thoughts and deeds of his character.

2. First Person

In the first person narration, the writer lets one of his characters to narrate the story. The early popular forms were epistolary, diary, and memoir where this first person narration used. Henry James experimented with the epistolary point of view in A Bundle of Letters by presenting the story through a series of letters written by six people living in a French boarding house. If you observe closely, you will see that dramatic monologue and interior monologue both also fall in this category of narration technique.

The first-person narrator is generally identified but can also be anonymous or ambiguous as to gender. One of the best examples of this is South African writer Nadine Gordimer's story Termitary (1974).

3. Central Intelligence

The author gets the narrative filtered through the perceptions, emotions, feelings, and observations of a single main character. This technique conveys a sense of immediacy as well as psychological realism, as it happens in the work of Henry James's The Beast in the Jungle (1903). Moreover, James Joyce's innovations with this style in Dubliners (1914) helped change the course of literature in the 20th century.

A point-of-view technique which is seldom used is the objective where the author poses as an objective observer and he never gives out the reader access to a character's thoughts and feelings. For instance, in French writer Alain Robbe-Grillet's The Secret Room (1962) the author harshly portrays a painting that depicts a murder.

American expatriate author Henry James developed several theories about fiction that influenced many short-story writers. And more importantly, all writers have often adopted the point of view that really suits their story to produce particular effect.