The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

182 Point of view
a ‘poem’, and again the verse criterion for
poetry arguably disappears.
See Jon Cook (ed.), Poetry in Theory
(2004); David Buchbinder, Contemporary
Literary Theory and the Reading of
Poetry (1991); Jeffrey Wainwright,
Poetry: The Basics (2004).
RGF and AER
Point of view A term used in twentiethcentury
theory and criticism of FICTION
to designate the position from which a
story is told. Although a large number of
these have been distinguished by some
critics, only two are common: first-person
and third-person narration (few authors
attempt the second-person: John Fowles,
Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Michel Butor).
Narration from the first-person point of
view has some obvious advantages in that
it enables the author, without artificiality,
to enter the intimacy of the protagonist’s
mind, in a STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
manner or otherwise. But there are also
limitations to this form of narration: if
access to the hero is privileged and extensive,
by the same token, since we are not
able to read the minds of other people, the
thoughts and feelings of the other characters
remain a matter of conjecture to hero,
author and reader alike. Needless to say,
some novelists turn this opaqueness to
good ironic account (cf. The Outsider
by Albert Camus (1942) which relies
heavily on the inscrutability of others).
Traditionally, the third person is, however,
the more widespread mode of narration,
and most novelists have assumed it grants
them licence to virtual omniscience. In a
famous essay Jean-Paul Sartre pilloried
François Mauriac for usurping wisdom
reserved only to God, who – Sartre concluded
with cutting emphasis – is no
artist, ‘any more than Mr Mauriac is’. As
if to forestall this sort of broadside, some
novelists have followed the example of
Flaubert in Madame Bovary (1857) and
used omniscience with such discretion
that it passes virtually unnoticed. Others,
again, have adopted Dickens’s practice
in Bleak House (1852–3) (intercalating
Esther’s narrative with omniscient narrative,
and allowing Esther occasionally to
narrate things not observed by her but
reported to her by others), or have imitated
the manner in which Conrad, in
Under Western Eyes (1911), employs an
intelligent first-person narrator having
privileged access to the mind of another
through the perusal of a private diary or
correspondence. Henry James is the novelist
usually most associated with detailed
exploration of point of view, but some
experimental novelists like Alain Robbe-
Grillet transcend the issue altogether by
abrupt and unsignposted shifts from one
point of view to another, in line with a
systematic undermining of the entire
traditional notion of consistency, and
produce works which read as William
Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury
(1929) would, if all its paragraphs were
placed in a hat and pulled out in random
order. See also NARRATIVE.
See Norman Friedman, ‘Point of view
in fiction’, PMLA, 70 (1955), 1160–84,
updated by Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric
of Fiction (1961); G. Genette, Narrative
Discourse (1980); S. S. Lanser, The
Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose
Fiction (1981); F. Stanzel, Narrative
Situations in the Novel (1969);
B. Uspensky, A Poetics of Composition
(trans. 1973); Paul Simpson, Language,
Ideology and Point of View (1993).
JWJF
Polyphony See DIALOGIC STRUCTURE.
Polysemy See AMBIGUITY.
Pornography Classified by the
Library of Congress as ‘Literature,