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Fictional Narrative Basics - Point of View
Unit Completion Date: End of Week 5
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Keep your definition of point of view handy as you move through the rest of this section to fill in anything you might not have included and also to let me know if you've included anything I have not. By the end of this discussion unit, we will have developed a working vocabulary to employ in workshopping one another's stories, and it's important in doing so that we all understand how these terms are being used.
Some of the most basic elements of point of view are tied to the grammar that is used to present the story, and these are probably the most familiar. These include verb tense and personal pronoun usage, or more commonly "tense" and "person." Together these elements establish the time of the action relative to the telling and the narrator's position with respect to the characters and events.
Tense is usually fairly straightforward. The action of a story is usually related in the one of the following:
- Present tense, which means the action is taking place at the time of the telling. (e.g. "We reach the parking lot of the A & P and John gets out first. I follow him in a hurry, thinking he's going to start a fight right there and then.")
- Past tense, which technically means the action has already occurred at the time of the story's telling. ("We reached the A & P and John got out first. I followed him in a hurry, thinking he was going to start a fight right there and then.") Generally in simple past tense, action directly precedes telling, so the present time of the story and the narrative time of the story are virtually the same. Readers generally accept simple past tense as happening "in the moment." If there is a great deal of time between the telling of the story and the events of the story ("Twenty years ago, on our last day of high school, my best friend Joe killed a man."), this is still being told in the past tense, but from a reminiscent perspective, which we will address later in this section.
A story could also be related in a future tense. ("We will reach the A & P parking lot, and John will get out first. I will follow in a hurry...")
Tense can become somewhat confusing for a story with a complicated chronology, as flash backs and flash forwards are related in tenses appropriate to the tense of the present time of the story. Each student will provide a point of view breakdown for their selected story later in this section, and you should examine these to see the unusual and complicated cases your classmates are grappling with.
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