Point of View Device
Since the narrator is within the story, he or she may not have knowledge of all the events. For this reason, first-person narrative is often used for detective fiction, so that the reader and narrator uncover the case together. One traditional approach in this form of fiction is for the main detective's principal assistant, the "Watson", to be the narrator: this derives from the character of Dr Watson in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories.
In the first-person-plural point of view, narrators tell the story using "we". That is, no individual speaker is identified; the narrator is a member of a group that acts as a unit. The first-person-plural point of view occurs rarely but can be used effectively, sometimes as a means to increase the concentration on the character or characters the story is about. Examples: William Faulkner in A Rose for Emily (Faulkner was an avid experimenter in using unusual points of view - see his Spotted Horses, told in third person plural); Frank B. Gilbreth and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey in Cheaper By the Dozen; Frederik Pohl in Man Plus; and more recently, Jeffrey Eugenides in his novel The Virgin Suicides and Joshua Ferris in Then We Came to the End. (Also used to good effect by Theodore Sturgeon in his short story Crate.)
First-person narrators can also be multiple, as in Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's In a Grove (the source for the movie Rashomon) and Faulkner's novel The Sound and the Fury. Each of these sources provides different accounts of the same event, from the point of view of various first-person narrators.
The first-person narrator may be the principal character or one who closely observes the principal character (see Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights or F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, each narrated by a minor character). These can be distinguished as "first person major" or "first person minor" points of view.
Read more about this topic: First-person Narrative
Famous quotes containing the words point of view, point of, point, view and/or device:
“From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“The success of a party means little more than that the Nation is using the party for a large and definite purpose.... It seeks to use and interpret a change in its own plans and point of view.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“But you must pay for conformity. All goes well as long as you run with conformists. But you, who are honest men in other particulars, know, that there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the day when you meet him, you sink into the class of counterfeits.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The view that honesty is something, and even a virtue, belongs, it is true, to those private opinions which are forbidden in this age of public opinions.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“UG [universal grammar] may be regarded as a characterization of the genetically determined language faculty. One may think of this faculty as a ‘language acquisition device,’ an innate component of the human mind that yields a particular language through interaction with present experience, a device that converts experience into a system of knowledge attained: knowledge of one or another language.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)