Lesson 1.3 · Unit 1 · RL.9-10.6
Who is telling this, and what can they know
Every story is told by somebody, and the choice of who determines what the reader can be told and what they must work out. Point of view is the single decision that most shapes how a story feels.
- First person uses "I" and is told by a character inside the story, so the reader knows only what that character knows.
- Third person limited uses "he" or "she" and stays inside one character's perceptions.
- Third person omniscient can enter any character's mind and report what nobody present knows.
- Third person objective reports only what a camera could record, entering nobody's thoughts.
- Second person uses "you" and is rare, because it asks the reader to accept being told what they are doing.
- An unreliable narrator gives an account the reader has reason to doubt, through madness, self-interest, limited understanding or deliberate deception.
- Unreliability is detected by discrepancy: what the narrator says conflicts with what the text shows, with itself, or with what people plainly do.
- Narrative distance is how close the telling sits to a character's mind, and it can move within a single paragraph.
Where students lose marks: treating first person as automatically unreliable. Most first person narrators are honest and simply limited, and unreliability must be demonstrated from the text rather than assumed.
The text. Edgar Allan Poe, "The Tell-Tale Heart", 1843. Public domain.
TRUE! nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How then am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily, how calmly I can tell you the whole story.
Step one: identify the point of view. First person. The narrator is a character in his own story and everything reaches us through him.
Step two: find the first discrepancy. He asks why we say he is mad, then offers as proof that he heard many things in hell. The evidence he selects to prove sanity is evidence of the opposite, and he does not notice.
Step three: find the second. He promises to tell the story "healthily, how calmly", and the paragraph containing that promise has an exclamation in its first word, four repetitions, three rhetorical questions and an imperative. The manner contradicts the claim within the same sentence.
Step four: state the technique precisely. Poe never says the narrator is mad. He gives him a defense and makes the defense the evidence. The reader convicts him out of his own mouth, which is why the story survives being obvious.
Step five: state the rule for detecting unreliability. Look for discrepancy between what the narrator asserts and what the text shows. Here the assertion is calm sanity and the text shows agitated derangement, and both are in the same seven sentences.
Step six: rewrite the opening in third person omniscient and see what is lost. "He had always been nervous, and the disease had made his hearing acute. He believed he was not mad." That is accurate and dead. The horror of this story is being trapped inside the mind making the argument, and the point of view is the only thing producing it.
Step seven: try third person objective. A camera records a man in a room talking. It cannot report that he heard things in hell, because that happened only inside him. The story becomes unintelligible, which shows that the choice of point of view determines what can be told at all.
Step eight: distinguish unreliable from limited. A limited narrator tells the truth as far as they can see it, and the reader simply does not learn what they do not know. An unreliable narrator's account is itself distorted, so the reader must correct it rather than merely supplement it. This narrator is unreliable; most first person narrators are only limited.
Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.
- Name the four main points of view.
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First person, third person limited, third person omniscient, and third person objective
- What can third person omniscient do that limited cannot?
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Enter any character's mind and report what nobody present knows
- What does third person objective report?
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Only what a camera could record, entering nobody's thoughts
- Define an unreliable narrator.
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One whose account the reader has reason to doubt
- How is unreliability detected?
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By discrepancy between what the narrator says and what the text shows
- Identify two discrepancies in the opening paragraph.
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First, he asks why we call him mad and offers as proof that he "heard many things in hell", so the evidence he selects for his sanity is evidence of the opposite and he does not notice. Second, he promises to tell the story "healthily, how calmly", and the paragraph containing that promise opens with an exclamation and contains four repetitions, three rhetorical questions and an imperative. The manner refutes the claim inside the same sentence. Hell as evidence of sanity, and a promise of calm delivered in a shout
- Explain Poe's technique and why it survives being obvious.
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He never states that the narrator is mad. He gives the narrator a defense and makes the defense itself the evidence, so the reader convicts him out of his own mouth. It survives being obvious because the pleasure is not in guessing the conclusion, which arrives in the first line, but in watching a man construct an argument whose every term betrays him while he believes he is being persuasive. The defense is the evidence, so the reader watches him convict himself
- What is lost if the opening is rewritten in third person omniscient?
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Everything that makes it frightening. "He had always been nervous, and the disease had made his hearing acute. He believed he was not mad" reports the same facts accurately and is dead on the page. The horror of the story is being trapped inside the mind making the argument and having no way to step outside it, and that effect is produced by the point of view alone rather than by any event in the plot. The entrapment inside the narrator's mind, which is the story's whole effect
- Why would third person objective make the story unintelligible?
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Because a camera can record a man in a room talking and cannot record that he heard things in heaven and in hell, since that occurred only inside him. The story consists almost entirely of internal states: the acuteness of hearing, the conviction of sanity, the beating heard beneath the floor. Strip those out and nothing remains but unexplained behavior, which shows the point of view determines what can be told at all. Its events are internal, and an objective camera cannot record them
- Distinguish an unreliable narrator from a limited one.
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A limited narrator tells the truth as far as they can see it, so the reader simply does not learn what that character does not know and can trust what is reported. An unreliable narrator's account is itself distorted, so the reader must correct it rather than merely supplement it. This narrator is unreliable; most first person narrators are only limited, and assuming otherwise without textual evidence is the common error. Limited leaves gaps to fill; unreliable requires the account to be corrected