Pedagogical Sample 3
© Jennifer Penkethman, 2025
© Jennifer Penkethman, 2025
This is a written lesson for college fiction writing course. This course was delivered entirely asynchronously on Canvas, requiring a combination of written and recorded lesson materials for each unit. This lesson covers point-of-view in storytelling. The tone of the lesson is geared towards student engagement and enjoyment, and is therefore less formal, meant to capture the tone I would normally use for in-person lectures.
We're moving on from covering basic story principles and structure, to talking about some of those features in detail. For me, point of view is potentially the most interesting thing to play around with when you're writing a story - I just think it could literally go anywhere, with so many modulations of character and plot development.
For strict definition, "point of view" refers to where the story is coming from: who is telling it? Most of the time it's a person, but there have been many great stories written from the point of view of animals (Leo Tolstoy's "Kholstomer" is told from the POV of a horse; Dave Eggers' "After I Was Thrown in the River" is narrated by a dog), ghosts, or even inanimate objects.
We also use POV to discuss whether the story is told in the first person ("I", "me", etc.), second person ("you"), or third person ("he" "she" "they").
Finally, point of view also relates to voice, which is the way this narrator expresses herself. We're kind of folding these two concepts (POV and voice) into one in this unit.
The first crucial factor to consider with POV in this lesson is how much the narrator knows. If you have a really close narration, where the reader literally only knows what the character knows, then this is known as "limited" narration. We as readers aren't omniscient; we only get the information that the character can give us. This can be the case in first as well as third person - even if the character is referred to as "he" or whatever, we can still be very close to them as readers, and only get the thoughts they would have, with no access to others' thoughts.
This factor, of thinking about what each character knows at any given moment, really allows us to construct something interesting where the information of the story isn't all out in the open, as it would be with an omniscient narrator who can tell us anything about any character. Close narration is effectively a restraint that requires the author to be creative - and, many times, makes the story much more interesting.
The second factor to consider is how much the narrator is telling the reader. They may know more than they are telling - or they may know less, in the case of the Rich story below. (That is, the narrator is unwittingly giving us hints of more than they understand themselves.) This often gets referred to as the "unreliable narrator" phenomenon, which raises questions of whether a narrator is lying, in denial, or otherwise untrustworthy.
As always, I recommend reading the pieces FIRST, so you don't get them spoiled for you by reading my writeups on them!
This piece is an example of first-person narration which is very close - we don't get anything except this character's interior monologue. Because we're eavesdropping on her conversation with God (and herself), the narrator doesn't bother to explain who "he" is or even give him a name; we have to deduce ourselves what she's referring to at a lot of points. For example, on page 2 the narrator says, "Are You punishing me, God, because I've been bad? Are You angry with me because I did that?" -- We don't get any explanation of what "that" is, because the narrator is not telling the story to us; she's only having a private conversation with God, where she wouldn't have to explain it. We don't know the narrator's name because that's not part of her thought process, either.
Imagine, after reading this piece, how it would be different if it were written as a traditional third-person story where the narrator's actions are described ("She paced the apartment and wrung her hands," etc.) and her words given as dialogue. We would be missing out on so much that Parker is doing with voice here: the repetition, the nervous demands, in short the whole personality of this character, the quality of her thoughts, which are recognizable to anyone who's had moments of severe social anxiety like this.
Dorothy Parker is a famous writer from the early 20th century, but I could not for the life of me find anything out about Cynthia Marshall Rich, despite this story being absolutely brilliant. In any case, this is a fantastic example of using the POV of one character to completely shape a story. It's narrated by the younger sister, discussing her older sister leaving the narrator and her father to marry a man whom the father finds "unsuitable" for very screwed-up reasons.
What's so skillful and brilliant here (and again, I highly recommend reading the story first!) is that the younger sister's perception of things is limited by how naive and clueless she is in some ways, but she's still giving us enough hints to see what's actually going on in this family dynamic. This strikes me as extremely realistic - as humans, we are all limited in our perceptive abilities, especially when it comes to family stuff. We are biased by our emotional drives and beliefs. This narrator, the younger sister, is heavily biased toward the father, who is a hero-figure to her, and she does not see his flaws - but we can see them, as the reader. The effect is that we feel like we know more than the narrator knows. The author has deftly used the limited POV to actually give us more knowledge than the characters have.
There are so many points where Rich achieves this effect, and I'll encourage you to find your own examples. The narrator, Sarah Ann, has a tendency to say the quiet part out loud without realizing it, like describing Olive as "sitting across the candlelight from my father like a little wife" - we understand that this is exactly what's happening, that it's not just a figure of speech, that the father has made Olive into his new wife after the previous one died. But Sarah Ann doesn't seem to realize how messed-up this is, which is what makes her so innocent.
Then there are parts where Sarah Ann is pretty obviously projecting or in denial of something, like when she says of Olive and her new boyfriend when comparing him with their father: "I think now that she was afraid of seeing them together, that she was afraid of seeing the difference." It's precisely because of the difference that Olive likes this new boyfriend; he doesn't try to control her like her father does, or make her into a carbon copy of their mother, but rather encourages her to be herself.
There is, for me, a very sinister undertone to this story as well, in that the narrator is probably not giving us the full nature of the father's relationship with Olive. This can be read as Sarah Ann being in denial, which is in my experience pretty common with delicate emotional stuff in families.
I could go on forever about this story, but I will open the discussion to all of you:
What did you make of these stories and their techniques?
Where did you see the POV being used effectively?
What other examples can you find in the "My Sister's Marriage" story of the narrator not giving full information, or projecting something that could be said about the father onto the boyfriend character?
Did you see even more possibility of what might be going on in the Rich story, like I did?
Do you have any examples in your own reading of narrators who are limited or don't give all the info ("unreliable")?
Please post your own thread and respond to at least one classmate to get full credit. Have fun!
*NB: Both of the pieces from this week are from a classic anthology called Points of View edited by James Moffett and Kenneth R. McElheny which I highly recommend picking up - it has dozens of stories which were not possible to cover here!