meta adjective \ ˈme-tə \
Definition of meta – 1informal : showing or suggesting an explicit awareness of itself or oneself as a member of its category : cleverly self-referential
Point of view is instinctive in storytelling, so embedded in the subconscious that it hardly has to be explained. Children get it: you’re telling a story that’s happening to you. Where’s the camera? Behind the narrator’s eyes: inside.
First person present was my 6 year-old grandkid ‘s choice for her memoir on breaking her arm. She opened in media res, in the ER: “I don’t want to be here.” Inciting incident: she had fallen from the monkey bars. All the building blocks of narrative were there.
Equally instinctive is our understanding of 3rd person omniscient. Simple to explain to a kindergartener: these are the stories that God narrates:
Once upon a time…
The first time in my reading life I recall being aware of an author’s decision to use a specific POV was—this dates me—at age 11 or so—whenever To Kill A Mockingbird came out in paperback. A grown-up wrote it, but a kid my age was telling the story in her own words. Wait. Can I do that? Entranced, I started my first novel, written longhand on a steno pad.
The next time a POV clobbered me was in high school when I hefted my beloved Moby Dick and read its immortal opener: Call me Ishmael.
Call me crazy, but Melville is employing a second-person point of view—and an imperative one at that. You. Yeah, YOU! Call me Ishmael!
Second person I think of as first-person on steroids. I gravitate to it automatically in my writing, though I didn’t really understand why until recently, another time POV clobbered me between the eyes.
It was during a session of the Off Campus Writers’ Workshop.
First person narrators are aware they are being heard; Fred Shafer observed.
This obvious yet stunning realization had eluded me my entire life. Knowing someone’s listening in, we allow our first person narrators to give the story their own spin—to tell it according to their own rules—to maybe not tell the truth.
Our first person narrators have information they may voluntarily disclose and withhold, but they may not be addressing and audience. Maybe they’re writing a diary entry, or a letter they’ll never mail, maybe they’re talking to a dead relative, or babbling to themselves.
But the second person narrator drops any pretense of privacy to stand stage front, speaking directly in front of the footlights. ‘Imagine.’ is how my first book starts. ‘Believe,’ the second begins. Whom is my narrator addressing in both cases? Yes, exactly. YOU.
So first and second person narrators are conscious they’re being observed, but not our narrators in third. Blissfully or pathetically unaware, these third person subjects are subjected to the unabashed voyeurism of the fly on the wall, or the judgments of those who look on unseen, we readers who are given access to the character’s innermost thoughts, the toilet paper sticking to their heels, the spinach in their teeth, from our omniscient, omnipresent perch that overlooks the scene.
Where’s the camera in third person POV? The placement can vary. It can hover close enough to see and hear individuals moving and speaking but high enough to see everybody, the way they film reality TV. It can soar at cruising altitude, the level from which stirring exposition and moral lessons emanate – ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’
Or the camera can zoom in to rest unseen upon the narrator’s shoulder, to apply that most prying of POVs, the close third. This character is constantly eavesdropped upon, relentlessly observed. We laugh with them and cry with them, smell what they’re smelling, eat their food, feel their fear, and all the while they don’t know we’re here.
When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. It’s a technique that keeps the reader separated from yet attached to the characters in a way that can heighten the narrative tension to excruciating levels, as in Cormac McCarthy’s hypnotic, horrifying post-apocalypse novel, The Road.
That’s 3rd for you, a narrative workhorse that fits any number of situations, that I never use. I prefer to write like I drive stick in the snow, keeping the gears in low.
So it’s not unexpected that I’m troubled by the latest trend in POV: multiple points of view coming from every conceivable angle, with readers sometimes kept in the dark as to who’s speaking, when and where.
I confided my consternation to author/professor Robert Anthony Siegel, who listened sympathetically. Has point of view become an anything goes, free-for-all? Writers jump from first person, to a close third of someone in the room, only to be interrupted by an unidentifiable voice—the last few selections from my book club have had this disease—
“Yes, point of view is a complex topic,” he agrees. “Up to around the time of Jane Austen, novels were told largely in exposition.”
As the novel evolved, so did the height from which the story was told.
Enter “the great, modernist master of point of view—Henry James. Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl. Marvelous writer. A forerunner of the true modernists like Eliot, Pound, Joyce. He’s brilliant on point of view and was one of the first to really think about it seriously—since Jane Austen two hundred years earlier.”
I interrupt to complain some more about the trend towards confusing, irritating jumps in perspective. Are writers doing this as some sort of conscious technique? Or are they just lazy? Is all this head-hopping a cop out?
“The advantage of keeping to one point of view, of course, is that staying with one character allows you to really deepen your understanding of that character.”
“It’s like they suddenly realize they want to introduce a plot point so they throw an omniscient voice in from nowhere,” I continue, nattering until I have to stop for air.
“It could be that they’re so focused on plot that they’re not thinking of the story as a character’s journey,” he gently interjects.
Later I’ll realize was something else on the tip of his tongue, some insightful and well-chosen words that I never heard because we were on zoom and I was glancing around the room, looking without seeing, speaking without listening, not stopping to think that a story is something other than a sequence of events, that the stories we love are those we see and hear and feel from somewhere deep—that those are the stories we best remember, the stories we want to live inside.