Point of View

When writing a new story, the author must decide who will be narrating the story. Basically, there are two kinds of points of view: the first-person point of view, and the third-person point of view. In the first-person point of view a fictitious observer tells us what he or she saw, heard, concluded, and thought and is usually characterized by the use of the pronoun “I”. The speaker or narrator may sometimes seem to be the author speaking directly using an authorial voice. For example, Nick Carraway in “The Great Gatsby” tells the story in a first-person point of view, sharing with the reader only his thoughts and what he sees is happening. Nick Carraway says, “He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy." (F. Scott Fitzgerald, 110). The second kind, the third-person point of view, breaks into three subdivisions: limited, omnisicent, and dramatic or objective. In third-person narrative, it is obvious that the narrator is merely an unspecified entity or uninvolved person that conveys the story and is not a character of any kind within the story being told. A limited third person, focuses being on one particular character and what he or she does, says, hears, thinks, and experiences, this is almost always the main character; an omniscient point of view knows the thoughts of all the characters. The third-person omniscient narrator is the least capable of being unreliable, although the omniscient narrator can have its own personality, offering judgments and opinions on the behavior of the characters. Finally, in the dramatic point of view, the story is confined only to the reporting of actions and speeches,the narrator is neutral and ineffective toward the progression of the plot, merely an uninvolved onlooker, a typical example of this point of view is “Hills Like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway, "All right. I was trying. I said the mountains looked like