How do I handle POV in a novel told by three characters?ONLINE EXCLUSIVE
Published:
December 1, 2011
Q: I want to write a novel told by three characters, but I’m stuck.
I’ve tried first person, but then it skews to one character. Third
person omniscient isn’t working either. What now?
A:
Not all first person accounts focus only on the character telling the
story, so that option could still be in the running if you want to give
it another try. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby,
for example, Nick Carraway tells Jay Gatsby’s story, while also covering
a bit about his own experience. (In this case, the story is clearly
Gatsby’s, but by the nature of Nick’s role, he also figures prominently.
This point-of-view strategy—where a first-person narrator tells another
character’s story—is called first-person peripheral.) When using first
person to tell a broader story, there’s bound to be some differences in
how much each character is emphasized. It might be best for a story
where one character has a particularly unique perspective on the events
or his perspective helps manage tension or direct the story in some way.
You have other choices, as well. First-person
plural tells a story through the collective “we” instead of the
singular “I.” Jeffrey Eugenides chose this approach for his novel The Virgin Suicides,
in which a group of boys—grown men at the telling of the story—attempt
to understand five sisters. Here, the boys arrive for a party at the
girls’ house, an event encouraged by a psychiatrist after the youngest
daughter’s suicide attempt:
We
were directed downstairs to the rec room. ... On a card table, the punch
bowl erupted lava. The paneled walls gleamed, and for the first few
seconds the Lisbon girls were only a patch of glare like a congregation
of angels. Then, however, our eyes got used to the light and informed us
of something we had never realized: the Lisbon girls were all different
people. Instead of five replicas with the same blond hair and puffy
cheeks we saw that they were distinct beings, their personalities
beginning to transform their faces and reroute their expressions. |
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