# POV Types and Voice — Detailed Guide

## The Five Principal Points of View

Each POV is demonstrated below using the same fictional scenario: Princess Sefrid enters a crowded room.

### 1. First Person

"I pushed through the crowd, scanning for Aleth. The heat was unbearable. Someone stepped on my foot — I barely noticed."

**Rules:**
- Only what "I" knows, feels, perceives, thinks, guesses, hopes, and remembers can be told
- The reader infers other characters only from what "I" observes
- Switching from first person to another POV within a piece is enormously difficult

**Strengths:** Maximum intimacy; strong voice; the reader is inside one mind completely
**Dangers:** Claustrophobia; every character risks sounding like the narrator; information delivery is limited to what the narrator can plausibly know

**Masters to study:** Grace Paley — first-person narration that avoids every pitfall

### 2. Limited Third Person

"Sefrid pushed through the crowd, scanning for Aleth. The heat was unbearable. Someone stepped on her foot — she barely noticed."

**Rules:**
- Same essential limitation as first person — nothing is seen or known except what this character sees and knows
- Switching from first to limited third is not just changing pronouns — the imaginative energy is different
- You can shift between limited-third viewpoint characters, but with care and awareness

**Strengths:** Intimacy without the constraints of "I"; can shift between characters; allows more flexibility in language
**Dangers:** Accidental one-sentence POV slips into other characters' thoughts; the reader may not notice, but they feel the wobble

### 3. Involved Author (Omniscient)

"Sefrid pushed through the crowd. Aleth, had she known, was already watching from the gallery, nursing a drink and a grievance. Neither woman would leave the room unchanged."

**Rules:**
- No single viewpoint character — the author can enter any mind, see anything, judge and interpret
- The author's voice is itself a presence in the narrative
- Requires confidence — a timid omniscient voice feels intrusive; a confident one feels authoritative

**Strengths:** Maximum flexibility; can provide context no character possesses; can move freely across time and space
**Dangers:** Can feel distant; requires a strong authorial voice; handled clumsily, reads as head-hopping

**Masters to study:** Tolstoy (War and Peace) — the gold standard

### 4. Detached Author (Fly on the Wall)

"A woman in a grey dress pushed through the crowd. She stopped twice, looked around, then continued toward the gallery. At the bar, another woman set down her glass."

**Rules:**
- Reports only what a neutral observer could infer from behaviour and speech
- Never enters a character's mind
- The least overtly but most covertly manipulative POV — everything is controlled by selection

**Strengths:** Creates mystery; forces the reader to interpret; powerful understatement
**Dangers:** Emotional coldness; readers may struggle to connect

**Masters to study:** Raymond Carver

### 5. Observer-Narrator

"I watched Sefrid push through the crowd. She was looking for someone — Aleth, I assumed, though with Sefrid you could never be sure what she was really after."

**Rules:**
- The narrator is a character but not the protagonist
- Available in both first and third person
- Natural mystery about the protagonist's inner life — the observer can speculate but not know

**Strengths:** Can observe the protagonist from outside while maintaining a personal voice
**Dangers:** The observer can upstage the protagonist; limited access to the protagonist's thoughts

**Masters to study:** Henry James, Willa Cather

## Voice

Voice is the sound of the narration — the personality, rhythm, diction, and sensibility that makes one narrator distinct from another. In practice, voice and POV are inseparable.

### What Creates Voice
- Word choice and diction level (formal, colloquial, technical, poetic)
- Sentence structure and rhythm
- What the narrator notices and ignores
- What the narrator judges and how
- The narrator's relationship to the reader (confiding, distant, unreliable, authoritative)

### Reliable vs. Unreliable Narrators
- In nonfiction: the author/narrator is expected to be honest about what they believe happened
- In fiction: unreliable narrators reveal how people see the world and why — their distortions are the point
- An unreliable narrator must be unreliable in ways the reader can eventually detect — otherwise there's no story, just confusion

**Master to study:** Henry James, "The Turn of the Screw" — the paradigmatic unreliable narrator
