Lesson 1.4 · Unit 1 · Short Fiction I · NAR 4.A, 4.B
The narrator and point of view
Someone is always telling the story, and that someone is part of it. A narrator is not a window; a narrator is a decision about what you are allowed to see.
Two questions start the analysis: who is speaking, and what does that position let them know? The answers set the limits of everything else you can argue.
- NAR-1.A. Narrators or speakers relate accounts to readers and establish a relationship between the text and the reader.
- NAR-1.B. Perspective refers to how narrators, characters, or speakers see their circumstances, while point of view refers to the position from which a narrator or speaker relates the events of a narrative.
- NAR-1.C. A speaker or narrator is not necessarily the author.
- NAR-1.D. The point of view contributes to what narrators, characters, or speakers can and cannot provide in a text based on their level of involvement and intimacy with the details, events, or characters.
- NAR-1.F. First-person narrators are involved in the narrative; their relationship to the events of the plot and the other characters shapes their perspective.
- NAR-1.G. Third-person narrators are outside observers.
- NAR-1.H. Third-person narrators' knowledge about events and characters may range from observational to all- knowing, which shapes their perspective.
- First person (NAR 4.A): a character tells the story, so every fact reaches you shaped by someone with a stake in it.
- Third-person limited (NAR 4.A): an outside voice held to one character's knowledge. What it cannot see is part of the design.
- Third-person omniscient (NAR 4.A): an outside voice free to enter any mind; whose mind, and when, is still a choice.
- Limits of a perspective (NAR 4.B): every point of view supplies some information and forbids other information. Ask what this narrator cannot know.
About the text: Edgar Allan Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” first published 1843. The opening paragraph and the first sentences of the second.
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.
It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night. Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye!
Poe uses first person to hand the reader a case and no way to check it. The narrator opens by demanding “why will you say that I am mad?”, answering a charge nobody on the page has brought, and then offers his own manner as proof: “observe how healthily — how calmly I can tell you the whole story.” The word calmly comes from a voice already broken into dashes, so the sentence undoes its own claim. Because everything arrives through him, there is no second account to test his against: the reader's doubt must be built from his own words. First person trades verification for intimacy, and the trade is the design.
Exam tip: name the point of view, then say what it prevents. “The story is told in first person” is a label, and labels earn nothing.
Narrators and speakers relate accounts to readers and so establish a relationship between the text and the reader. Keep the narrator and the author apart: a speaker or narrator is not necessarily the author. Poe did not claim to hear “all things in the heaven and in the earth”; the narrator he invented does. Here the relationship the narrator sets up is a defense, because he is trying to persuade you he is sane.
Write one paragraph arguing what Poe gains by giving this story to the narrator rather than an outside observer. Quote two phrases of eight words or fewer.
Show a model response
Poe's first-person narration turns the reader into the jury this narrator keeps addressing. He begins by asking “why will you say that I am mad?”, a question that answers an accusation no one has made, and then submits his delivery as evidence: “how calmly I can tell you the whole story.” Since everything reaches us through him, we cannot look past him for a second opinion, so our suspicion has to be built from the way he talks: the interruptions, the insistence, the hurry to be believed. An outside narrator could report that he was disturbed; this one makes us notice it ourselves.
Rubric: the claim names an effect of the narration (Row A); each quotation is followed by commentary explaining how the wording produces it (Row B).