POVOverhead

SOURCE: http://mason.gmu.edu/~rjann

ENGLISH 325 LECTURE
POINTS OF VIEW
MARCH 2, 2005
Professor Rosemary Jann

Irony

Irony is an implied discrepancy between what is said and what is meant or between what is expected and what occurs. Irony is generally divided into three types:

1. Verbal Irony occurs when an author says one thing and means something else; this is similar to sarcasm, when a speaker says one thing and means the opposite.

2. Situational Irony involves a discrepancy or incongruity between the expected result and actual result. It would be ironic for a fire station to burn down, for instance.

3. Dramatic irony occurs when the audience or the reader understands something more or something other than what the character or speaker understands. Although this type of irony is most often associated with drama, a version of it can occur through a manipulation of point of view, for instance in the perceptions of a naive or unreliable first person narrator. A similar effect can be created through certain types of indirect quotation in third person narration.

Conventional Classifications of Point of View

(See also the discussion of point of view on pp. 66-69 of your anthology)

Point of view is conventionally classified according to the position assumed by the narrating voice.

1. First-person narration: narrator uses the pronoun "I" and is usually a participant in the action of the story.

First-person narrators are usually designated as "reliable" (the reader can trust their perceptions of events) or as "naive" or "unreliable" (the reader perceives or understands something other or something different than the narrator; this discrepancy usually creates irony).

Second-person narration : narrator uses the pronoun "you," although this technique usually operates as a disguised version of first-person narration.

Third-person narration: narrator uses the pronouns "he," "she," or "they." Third-person narrators do not participate in the action of the story and are often further classified by how much access they give us to the minds of the characters.

Objective narrators report from a perspective outside the minds of all characters.

Omniscient, that is, "all knowing" narrators have access to the thoughts and feelings of one or more characters. They may shift the point of view from one character's consciousness to another's in the course of a work of fiction.

Seymour Chatman, a critic who has written extensively about point of view, refers to the process by which a third-person omniscient narrator allows us to perceive thoughts and view events from inside a character's mind as using a narrative "filter." Authors use various techniques for taking us inside a consciousness or showing us how things are viewed through that character's filter in a story with third-person narration.

Methods for Constructing Narrative Filters

1. Report: Third-person narrator reports on character's thoughts.

ex. "Smith felt that he was wrong to have done that."

2. Quotation

a. Direct tagged quotation: third-person narrator can quote the character's thoughts directly, inside quotation marks and using "tag" phrases like "he said" or "she thought."

ex. "I was wrong to have done that," Smith thought.

b. Indirect tagged quotation: third-person narrator shifts the character's thoughts and the tag phrases into 3rd-person pronouns and usually drops quotation marks.

ex. He was wrong to have done that, he thought.

c. Indirect untagged quotation (also known as free quotation, free indirect style, indirect discourse, or narrated monolog): the quotation is indirect because the pronouns are 3rd person and "free" because there are no tags like "he said."

ex. He was wrong to have done that.

3. Stream of Consciousness: this technique attempts to duplicate the flow of thoughts and sense impressions as they occur in a character's mind. Often ordinary grammar and punctuation break down in the effort to capture the flux of perceptions in that character's consciousness.

Note that when converting a direct quotation into an indirect one, the tense of the verb normally shifts into past tense:

ex. (direct quotation, either tagged or untagged.)

I am late [he thought].

I was late [he thought].

I will be late [he thought].

Am I late? [he wondered].

ex. (indirect untagged quotation)

He was late.

He had been late.

He would be late.

Was he late?

Examples:

Obtrusive Narrators: Anthony Trollope and Ambrose Bierce

Unreliable First-Person Narrator: Edgar Allan Poe

Second-Person Narrator: Charles Johnson

Stream of Consciousness: William Faulkner

Variations in filter:

Austen, from Emma; Porter, "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall"

Mansfield, "Miss Brill"