Use Point of View as an Information System

“Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband’s death.” Kate Chopin opens “The Story of an Hour” from outside Louise Mallard, in the voice of the people managing her, who watch her weep “with sudden, wild abandonment” and take it for grief. (She wrote it April 19, 1894, and it was first printed in Vogue that December 6 as “The Dream of an Hour”.) Then she goes to her room alone, and the story goes with her. We see what she sees from the armchair, treetops, a peddler, patches of blue sky, and hear the word she whispers, “free, free, free!” Her sister Josephine kneels with her lips to the keyhole, begging her to open the door.

Then her husband, Brently, unaware of any accident, walks in with his latchkey. The narration has stepped out of her to report Richards’s errand and Brently’s ignorance, and it never enters her at the sight of him. The last sentence belongs to the house: “When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease—of joy that kills.” Only the reader holds what makes that verdict ironic.

A point of view decides what reaches the reader, in what order and in whose idiom, and what the reader cannot learn at all, and so what the reader is permitted to be wrong about. Drafts often treat it as a question of voice, first person intimate and omniscient old-fashioned. Those feelings are secondary to who can know this, when, and what they would notice and miss. A mystery drafted in close third on the detective, whose crucial scene is the culprit’s private decision to run, must break the viewpoint or report the scene secondhand.

Access is what the viewpoint can perceive and know. Emphasis is what it notices and weighs. Blindness is what it cannot see, or will not. Suspense is the gap between what the viewpoint knows and what the reader suspects or wants to learn.

In Dickinson’s “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died,” the poem gives its speaker an impossible vantage and manages it by obeying its own access rule. It reports only what can be perceived and done from the bed, down to the fly “between the light—and me.” It ends where perception ends: “I could not see to see.” Practice 68 reads the same poem for what its dashes do to the sound.

A reporter or essayist knows what she saw and has testimony about the rest, so a sentence like “he thought” needs a source. Without one, she has quietly adopted the access of an omniscient narrator (71).

Restriction is not automatically a virtue. A narrator who can go anywhere controls suspense by other means, dramatic irony above all. A writer cornered by a viewpoint’s limits may turn to a letter, an overheard conversation, a second viewpoint, or a change in the narrator’s stance (38). Whatever the tracking method, keep the record per scene: who knows what at this point, and how they came to know it.

Practice. Pick one scene and list, in twenty minutes, what the viewpoint (a character, an essay’s narrator, a poem’s speaker) cannot know in it: facts, other people’s thoughts, events in other rooms, the meaning of what is seen. Aim for at least five. Mark each one A (the reader never needs it), B (the reader will get it by another route, such as a letter, another scene, or a gesture the viewpoint misreads) or C (the scene fails without it, so the viewpoint should change). Then write 150 words in which one B item reaches the reader through someone’s misreading, the viewpoint character’s or a bystander’s, as the doctors’ verdict does in Chopin’s story.