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:
“There are neither good nor bad subjects. From the point of view of pure Art, you could almost establish it as an axiom that the subject is irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things.”
—Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880)
“Constancy in love is of two sorts: One is the effect of new excellencies that are always presenting themselves afresh, and attract our affections continually; the other is only from a point of honor, and a taking of pride not to change.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)
“Many women are surprised by the intensity of their maternal pull and the conflict it brings to their competing roles. This is the precise point at which many women feel the stress of the work/family dilemma most keenly. They realize that they may have a price to pay for wanting to be both professionals and mothers. They feel guilty for not being at work, and angry for being manipulated into feeling this guilt. . . . They don’t quite fit at home. They don’t quite fit at work.”
—Deborah J. Swiss (20th century)
“Currently, U.S. society has been encouraged by its political and subsidized mass-media intelligentsia to view U.S. life as a continual “morning in America” paradise, where the only social problems occur in the inner cities. Psychologists call this denial.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“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)