Exploring the Point of Views

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What is a point of view?

You probably know what it means to write in the first person, but you may not be as confident about using the second or third-person point of view. Today we’re going to focus on each of these three points of view. In grammatical terms, first person, second person, and third person refer to personal pronouns. Each “person” has a different perspective, a “point of view,” and the three points of view have singular and plural forms as well as three case forms.

Scenario: An accident occurs. An automobile driver and a motorcycle driver are involved. Witnesses include six sidewalk spectators, a security guard, a woman with a video camera who happened to be shooting the scene, and the pilot of a helicopter that was flying overhead.

Here we have eleven different points of view and, most likely, eleven different descriptions of the accident.

In short fiction, who tells the story and how it is told are critical issues for an author to decide. The tone and feel of the story, and even its meaning, can change radically depending on who is telling the story.

Remember, someone is always between the reader and the action of the story. That someone is telling the story from his or her own point of view. This angle of vision, the point of view from which the people, events, and details of a story are viewed, is important to consider when reading a story.

First-person point of view is in use when a character narrates the story with I-me-my-mine in his or her speech. The advantage of this point of view is that you get to hear the thoughts of the narrator and see the world depicted in the story through his or her eyes. However, remember that no narrator, like no human being, has complete self-knowledge or, for that matter, complete knowledge of anything. Therefore, the reader's role is to go beyond what the narrator says.

Let's use the example of an accident above. The automobile driver, which we'll name as Jiyong, has a different point of view of the accident. He might think that the motorcycle driver is to blame. In this case, he might not grasp the true situation but the reader does, because Jiyong gives information that the reader can interpret. For that matter, we may not understand what truly happened, rather we may learn what Jiyong's thoughts and feelings are about the accident.

In the subjective case, the singular form of the first person is “I,” and the plural form is “we.” “I” and “we” are in the subjective case because either one can be used as the subject of a sentence. You constantly use these two pronouns when you refer to yourself and when you refer to yourself with others. Here’s a sentence containing both:

Ex: I (first-person singular) look forward to EXO's first ever concert in Seoul. We (first-person plural) are currently heading to the venue.

Besides “I” and “we,” other singular first person pronouns include “me” (objective case) and “my” and “mine” (possessive case). Plural first person pronouns are “us” (objective case) and “our” and “ours” (possessive case). Those are a lot of forms and cases, so the following example of a sentence that uses the first person--with both singular and plural forms and all three cases--will, I hope, help identify the different uses:

Ex: I asked Sehun to help me with my history project, and we somehow got the project done early during the last week of December in spite of our packed schedules. I’m quite proud of us and ended up calling the project ours instead of mine.

For further clarification regarding the eight first-person pronouns used above, here’s a table:

Second-person point of view, in which the author uses you and your, is rare; authors seldom speak directly to the reader. When you encounter this point of view, pay attention. Why? The author has made a daring choice, probably with a specific purpose in mind. Most times, second-person point of view draws the reader into the story, almost making the reader a participant in the action. Authors here on AFF use this point of view mostly for 'You' fics, since you are one of the main characters. This is actually effective, but not all the time, since the readers become a participant in the story.

You use the second-person point of view to address the reader, as I just did. The second person uses the pronouns “you,” “your,” and “yours.” We use these three pronouns when