If multiple points of view have certain advantages over an authorial POV, what, if any, are the benefits of multiple points of view over a single POV?
According to Goodman, one advantage over the single POV is enhancement of character relationships: “Having multiple POVs helps create more dynamic relationships because you can see a bond from a 360-perspective.” In the case of a dual POV, she says, “You get to know how both characters feel about one another, why they’re acting the way they’re acting, and what they think about the other person. What results is a rich relationship that leaps off the page.”
But that’s not all. There’s also a benefit for the reader. “Using this technique can also provide more points of entry for readers. Perhaps Reader A falls in love with the voice of Character A, while Reader B finds more to love about Character B.”
Plot-wise, Lee Martin, author of five novels, feels limited by a single POV. “One character can take the story only so far before another character has to pick it up. The skillful use of this approach involves knowing when to pass the baton from one point-of-view character to another.”
In order to “maintain suspense,” says Martin, “you usually let one point-of-view character take the story to some high point of interest and then let another point-of-view character complicate what the readers think they know.” You can do this in one of two ways, he says: 1) “either by presenting another part of the story that stands in contrast to the part a different point-of-view character has delivered” or 2) “by creating an ironic effect from what the reader knows that the point-of-view characters don’t.”
But the payoff, for Martin, goes beyond plotting. For him, as for Goodman, it extends to characterization as well. “Shifting the point of view can reveal layers of characters that they may not be able to reveal themselves, making for a more nuanced portrait.”
In several of his novels, Martin has used multiple points of view for different purposes. In The Bright Forever, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, he wrote a hundred pages from one character’s POV before he realized that it would take multiple POVs to tell his story about the abduction of a young girl in a small Midwestern town in 1972 – it needed, he says, to be “a suspenseful portrait of a small town immersed in guilt.” Multiple POVs would not only create a “nuanced portrayal of the community” but also “enhance the mystery of what really happened that fateful night.”
Different novels call for different treatments. Instead of several points of view, the right choice might be a dual POV. According to Finlay, her novel Your One and Only illustrates a good reason for choosing a dual POV over a single one. Only through the dual POV was she able to handle plot, character, and theme sufficiently. She sums her novel up as “a story about a society made up entirely of clones and the first new human introduced into that society in centuries. I wanted to explore the perspective of both an insider in the culture and an outsider, and the conflicts each character would face.”
Without the dual POV of the new human and clone, she couldn’t represent the conflicting perspectives of insider and outsider. “I was able to explore what the conflict and tension of being ingrained in an insular, defined culture might be, as well as offer the views, thoughts, and feelings of an outsider in that same culture. Someone within the culture and someone outside of it.”
