Point of View Point of view is from whose consciousness the reader hears, sees, and feels the story.

First-person narrative is a narrative mode where a story is narrated by one character at a time, speaking for and about themselves. First-person narrative may be singular, plural or multiple as well as being an authoritative, reliable or deceptive "voice" and represents point of view in the writing. The narrators explicitly refer to themselves using words and phrases involving "I" (referred to as the firstperson singular) and/or "we" (the first-person plural). This allows the reader or audience to see the point of view (including opinions, thoughts, and feelings) only of the narrator, and no other characters. In some stories, first-person narrators may refer to information they have heard from the other characters, in order to try to deliver a larger point of view. Other stories may switch from one narrator to another, allowing the reader or audience to experience the thoughts and feelings of more than one character.

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 Ferrisin 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 Rynosuke 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 Bront'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. The second-person narrative is a narrative mode in which the protagonist or another main character is referred to by employment of second-person personal pronouns and other kinds of addressing forms, for example the English second-person pronoun "you". Example:

You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy. Opening lines of Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City (1984) Traditionally, the employment of the second-person form in literary fiction has not been as prevalent as the corresponding first-person and third-person forms, yet second-person narration is, in many languages, a very common technique of several popular and non- or quasi-fictional written genres such as guide books, self-help books, do-it-yourself manuals,interactive fiction, role-playing games, gamebooks such as the Choose Your Own Adventure series, musical lyrics, advertisements and also blogs. Although not the most common narrative technique in literary fiction, second-person narration has constituted a favoured form of various literary works within, notably, the modernand postmodern tradition. In addition to a significant number of consistent (or nearly consistent) second-person novels and short-stories by, for example, Michel Butor, Marguerite Duras, Carlos Fuentes, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the technique of narrative second-person address has been widely employed in shorter or longer intermittent chapters or passages of narratives by William Faulkner, Gnter Grass, Italo Calvino, Nuruddin Farah, Jan Kjrstad and many others (cf. the list of second-person narratives below).

Third-person view
Third-person narration provides the greatest flexibility to the author and thus is the most commonly used narrative mode in literature. In the third-person narrative mode, each and every character is referred to by the narrator as "he", "she", "it", or "they", but never as "I" or "we" (first-person), or "you" (secondperson). In third-person narrative, it is obvious that the narrator be merely an unspecified entity or [citation uninvolved person that conveys the story, but not a character of any kind within the story being told needed] . Third-person singular (he/she) is overwhelmingly the most common type of third-person narrative, before there have been successful uses of the third-person plural (they), as in Maxine Swann's short story [5] "Flower Children". Even more common, however, is to see singular and plural used together in one story, at different times, depending upon the number of people being referred to at a given moment in the plot. In third-person narratives, a character never would refer to himself in the third-person e.g., [citation needed] "(Character name) would like to come with you". If the narrator of the story is not present or is present but not a protagonist and a story told by someone [6] else and not his own, the story is narrated by He/She perspective. The third-person modes are usually categorized along two axes. The first is the subjectivity/objectivity axis, with "subjective" narration describing one or more character's feelings and thoughts, while "objective" narration does not describe the feelings or thoughts of any characters. The second axis is between "omniscient" and "limited", a distinction that refers to the knowledge available to the narrator. An omniscient narrator has omniscient knowledge of time, people, places and events; a limited narrator, in contrast, may know absolutely everything about a single character and every piece of knowledge in that character's mind, but it is "limited" to that character that is, it cannot describe things unknown to the focal character.

Third-person, omniscient
Historically, the third-person omniscient perspective has been the most commonly used; it is seen in countless classic novels, including works by Jane Austen, Leo Tolstoy,Charles Dickens, and George

Eliot. A story in this narrative mode is presented by a narrator with an overarching point of view, seeing and knowing everything that happens within the world of the story, including what each of the characters [8] is thinking and feeling. It sometimes even takes a subjective approach. One advantage of omniscience is that this mode enhances the sense of objective reliability (i.e. truthfulness) of the plot. The third-person omniscient narrator is the least capable of being unreliablealthough the omniscient narrator can have its own personality, offering judgments and opinions on the behavior of the characters. In addition to reinforcing the sense of the narrator as reliable (and thus of the story as true), the main advantage of this mode is that it is eminently suited to telling huge, sweeping, epic stories, and/or complicated stories involving numerous characters. The disadvantage of this mode is that it can create more distance between the audience and the story, and thatwhen used in conjunction with a sweeping, epic "cast of thousands" storycharacterization is more limited, which can reduce the reader's identification with or attachment to the characters. A classic example of both the advantages and disadvantages of this mode is J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Some writers and literary critics, make the distinction between the third-person omniscient and the universal omniscient, the difference being that in universal omniscient, the narrator reveals information that the characters do not have. This is also called "Little Did He Know" writing, as in, "Little did he know he'd be dead by morning." Usually, the universal omniscient enforces the idea of the narrator being unconnected to the events of the story. Some more modern examples are Lemony Snicket, James Eugene Robinson in his novel, The Flower of Grass, and Philip Pullman. In some unusual cases, the reliability and impartiality of the narrator may in fact be as suspect as in the third person limited.

point of view

n , pl points of view 1.a position from which someone or something is observed 2.a mental viewpoint or attitude 3.the mental position from which a story is observed or narrated:the omniscient point of v

An author can tell a story from the first-person point of view.

OR
The author can use the third-person point of view.
Let's look at both points of view.

First-person Point of View A character in the story is the narrator. This character is telling the story. The narrator uses the pronouns I, me and we. In first-person point of view, readers learn about events as the narrator learns about them.

Third-person Point of View The story is being told by an outside observer (someone who is not in the story). The author uses the pronouns he, she, and they. In third-person point of view, the author can tell about the thoughts, actions, and feelings of the other characters.

Examples

First - Person Point of View

I walked home from school today with my friends. We stopped for ice cream. I had vanilla. It's my favorite. When I got up this morning I brushed my teeth. Then I got dressed and ate my breakfast.

Third - Person Point of View

Ted plays on a baseball team. He loves to play with his team. He has a game next week. His coach thinks he's a good baseball player. The princess was locked in the tower. She had no way to escape. She hoped that a prince would rescue her. Her wish came true. He came and took her to his castle.