Third Person Plural Observer ("They")

Here the perceptions of a critical situation come from a group of characters who watch the protagonist. It could be a group of boys watching a teenage girl undressing in her window as in: "They saw her in the window." The excerpt from "A Rose for Emily" might as easily be written in the point of view.

First and Second Combined

This point of view is usually used in love poetry, and rarely in fiction. In this example from "The Roaring Bull and Electra," a short story, it’s an adult daughter speaking to her father too ill to speak for himself.

Today the new Roaring Bull was christened, and I wanted you to be next to me as you had been, twenty years ago . . . Now you can’t speak. You can barely swallow. I used to feed you melted ice cream and stroke your throat to get it down because I thought the taste would remind you of our ferry rides . . .

First and Third Combined

This point of view is used for characters with a personality dichotomy, to look at the same character from different angles. In "Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story" Russell Banks does this to portray a narcissistic man’s affair with a homely woman.

I felt warmed by her presence and was flirtatious and bold, a little pushy even.

Picture this. The man, tanned, limber . . . enters the apartment behind the woman.

The switch to third person is the character taking a look at himself, the way one might want to see himself projected onscreen. The shift in point of view might be annoying to the reader, so it’s important to establish this shift pattern early in your story.

Try this exercise:

Choose one of your favorite stories and rewrite a scene from it in one of the "unusual points of view." You might want to try rewriting one of the excerpts above. In your exercise show the original passage, then your changed point of view (or points of view). You get extra brownie points if you write a scene from scratch. This is a challenging exercise, but it also shows you don’t have to be limited by variations of first and third person.

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