On the Way to the Beginning: Point of View

In defence of the subjective omniscient, messy storytelling and the active author.

Thank you for joining me again in my musings on the way to the beginning. As with the previous instalment, Invisible Frames (which discusses a related topic but is not necessarily preliminary reading), the quoted passages within the postscript and footnotes of this piece make up nearly half of it — and were added just in case any readers wanted to see more extracts from the texts I revisited when I was writing this.

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Storytellers often consider the choice between writing in a limited first or third person point of view — sometimes even adding the option of the second person — but the omniscient point of view seems thoroughly neglected these days, though it has been the prevailing approach to storytelling throughout much of human history. A limited point of view is certainly not a wrong choice — I think it’s sometimes unequivocally the right choice — but contemporary fiction is becoming saturated with it, and the advantages of the omniscient alternative seem largely understated.

When they reached the door they heard voices in the room.

“What is it?” cried Razumihin.

Raskolnikov was the first to open the door; he flung it wide and stood still in the doorway, dumbfounded.

His mother and sister were sitting on his sofa and had been waiting an hour and a half for him. Why had he never expected, never thought of them, though the news that they had started, were on their way and would arrive immediately, had been repeated to him only that day? They had spent that hour and a half plying Nastasya with questions. She was still standing before them and had told them everything by now. They were beside themselves with alarm when they heard of his “running away” to-day, ill and, as they understood from her story, delirious! “Good Heavens, what had become of him?” Both had been weeping, both had been in anguish for that hour and a half.

A cry of joy, of ecstasy, greeted Raskolnikov’s entrance. Both rushed to him. But he stood like one dead; a sudden intolerable sensation struck him like a thunderbolt. He did not lift his arms to embrace them, he could not. His mother and sister clasped him in their arms, kissed him, laughed and cried. He took a step, tottered and fell to the ground, fainting.

Anxiety, cries of horror, moans … Razumihin, who was standing in the doorway, flew into the room, seized the sick man in his strong arms and in a moment had him on the sofa.

- Fyodor Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment); translated by Constance Garnett.

The omniscient point of view can sometimes be difficult to follow when reading — with the narrator moving from one character to another in the space of a paragraph or two — but it offers some incredible advantages of information (or tension) control and release. It’s particularly difficult to write effectively — similar to the second person — but (to name just a few excellent works — and I think I should name a few because they will undoubtedly provide a greater defence of omniscient storytelling than my explorative thoughts in this informal essay) the following all contain excellent passages showcasing this choice of point of view:

The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, many of the Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, Ivanhoe, Oliver Twist, Crime and Punishment, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, At the Back of the North Wind, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Manalive, The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Lord of the Rings, Dune and a number of Henry Lawson’s short stories.

The omniscient point of view requires more effort from both the writer and the reader than a limited point of view — to begin with, at least. If the storyteller is skilled, though, and the reader’s heart is softened, then they will soon trust one another, and the anticipation to interact with the various differing minds within the story will encourage deeper participation in the tale.

A limited point of view offers ease, efficiency and cleanliness of prose — but don’t we have enough ease, efficiency and sanitised sanity in our lives? Give me a holy sprawling, omniscient mess or maze every now and then; one that forces me to slow down, savour and decipher with relish — and that rekindles my participation in sacred boredom¹ and rest.

Sometimes, when folk speak of authors of bygone eras as having an outdated style, I think to myself, Thank goodness, I’m somewhat tired of the date I’m living in. In some ways, the current date is one of the walls of the prison from which good storytelling offers an escape. Maybe a style that is a little out of our current moment and more difficult to read — but has survived primarily because of its utility to those who previously encountered it — is just what we sometimes need.

Author and Conceit

Late Modern and Postmodern literature is obsessed with erasing the storyteller, the author, seeking to imply, rather absurdly, that a story should tell itself — and that it needs no connection to a living teller or recorder. This is like implying that a mind can move outside itself for the purpose of observing itself — something that the proud left hemisphere is no doubt foolishly confident it can accomplish².

One of the biggest advantages that the omniscient point of view offers, though, is the licence to be an active storyteller/author. The omniscient point of view demands that someone tell the story — it necessitates that a living voice should tell it — rather than the impossible non-entity implied by many contemporary works of fiction. This bold, expansive point of view provokes a reader to consider why the writer has the authority to use it in telling that particular story (why he is, in fact, the author).

This notion of an active author is firmly connected to the conceit of the invisible frame — I actually had this topic incorporated into Invisible Frames until the post grew too long — because the obscuring of the frame is often the literary device or pose that provides the suspension of disbelief that allows for the acceptance of an omniscient point of view in works of speculative fiction.

Objective and Subjective

The omniscient point of view is usually written in one of two ways: objective or subjective. The objective omniscient point of view does not claim to know the internal thoughts or feelings of characters and is therefore a choice traditionally reserved for strict historical accounts (though not always — see Ernest Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants for a rare example of the objective omniscient in a fictional short story³). The subjective omniscient, on the other hand, has prevailing dominance in the realms of mythology and folklore.

First and Third

Folk often refer to the omniscient point of view as ‘third person omniscient’ (excluding the possibility of first or second person omniscient) but I find this misleading. It’s perfectly conceivable for the teller of a story to have been involved in the story itself and, during or afterwards, to have recorded his own point of view as well as those of others — which is, in fact, the pose I am assuming for a good deal of Flames of the Exiled.

Mary Shelley approaches this in Frankenstein — and Tolkien does of course speak of himself in the first person (as the translator) in parts of The Red Book of Westmarch⁴ — but I have not seen this pose achieved anywhere quite as explicitly as in George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind⁵ (and perhaps, as I’m currently discovering, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov).

Resurrecting the Storyteller

I suppose I don’t need much of a conclusion here, as I seem to have kept my musings quite brief. It’s a fairly simple notion I want to express: that while a limited point of view may provide ease, simplicity and a kind of purity for the author and the audience, a more difficult, sporadically sprawling omniscient point of view delivers other, perhaps understated advantages of active storytelling, tension control and audience engagement. My hope is that Christ (the greatest muse) might breathe new life into the storyteller, encouraging him to imbue his tales with all the character and vision God might grant him.

Feel free to continue on and peruse some of the examples in the postscript and footnotes …

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Until next time,

Peter Harrison

PS. Examples from Flames of the Exiled and Of Ashes Born:

The following passage is from the Prelude to Silent Skies, a scene that I found particularly fun to write primarily because I allowed myself to wander in an omniscient point of view throughout it …

As the rain died from a drizzle into nothing, a member of the company leaned back against the tree behind her with a contented sigh. She was perched on its gnarled roots, torn free of the wet earth. The whisper of wind soothed her, even though it was chilling through her sodden clothes.

Her weary companions were also drenched, yet most were glad to be sitting before a warm fire … glad to be alive—against terrible odds.

The boy nearest her did not look as comfortable as the rest, swiping his blood-red fringe out of his eyes and clenching his jaw against the wind as he watched the flames flicker. His hair had grown far beyond his liking, and he was nearly constantly irritated by its intrusion into his vision.

He was crouched on his travel pack, avoiding the sludgy forest floor on which he had placed his poleaxe, its blade wrapped in oiled leather. He sniffed and began to rub his hands together, not drawing his gaze away from the firelight.

On his other side, also hunkered down on a pack, was one of the twins, his arms folded across his chest to keep some of the warmth in. Eyes on the fire, he spoke. ‘Anyone want to hear another story?’

After a moment’s silence, his twin shook her head. ‘I’ll probably fall asleep halfway through,’ she said. Apart from their short blond hair, the two had little in common.

Several of them smiled, agreeing that watching the flames was enough for now.

And here is another example from Of Ashes Born, a novella I’ve serialised here on Substack (written entirely in the subjective omniscient):

There was but one misjudgement of character, and to Toran’s surprise, it had nothing to do with Galorian.

The moon—ever obnubilated by storm clouds—had waxed and waned since their council, and the day of their departure was upon them at last. Gallamis had spoken to Lezli, explaining that he had to leave that day and that he would be back with more marriage proposals before she knew it. Lezli, however, was a lady of Hamborty’s court and—intuiting that Gallamis’ movements were treasonous—had reported him to the Captain of Hamborty’s Watch, Rachrinor, believing it would elevate her social position.

So it happened that when the recalcitrant crew was preparing their vessel—and the tide was turning favourable—a company of armed guards crossed the gangplank to question them. Ravunbror and Rebror were helping load the vessel, a breeze was picking up and, as always, the hells looked ready to berate Hazathsad with hail and lightning. The city was bathed in blue from the lighthouse, and the distant western crags and summits were crowned in thick fog.

The Guard—armoured in plate and armed with battleaxes—made for Rador first, who was already descending from the quarterdeck to meet them.

‘What’s this about?’ he snapped as he met them. ‘We’re due to put out within the hour, so I haven’t much time.’

Rachrinor, who had spotted one of his sons disappearing below deck, was frowning slightly as he turned his gaze on Rador. ‘Just a few questions about your voyage, Shipwright,’ he said slowly.

1. Boredom, The Guide to Mystery is a brief and profoundly thought-provoking reflection from Joanna’s Gleanings for anyone interested in sacred boredom.

2. This passage from Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and his Emissary (Chapter 2: What Do the Hemispheres ‘Do’?) is fascinating to consider alongside the observation that in contemporary fiction, the storyteller is becoming more and more detached from the story:

More than this, the right and left hemispheres see the body in different ways. The right hemisphere, as one can tell from the fascinating changes that occur after unilateral brain damage, is responsible for our sense of the body as something we ‘live’, something that is part of our identity, and which is, if I can put it that way, the phase of intersection between our selves and the world at large. For the left hemisphere, by contrast, the body is something from which we are relatively detached, a thing in the world, like other things (en soi, rather than pour soi, to use Sartre’s terms), devitalised, a ‘corpse’. […]

The left hemisphere appears to see the body as an assemblage of parts […]

Interestingly, when there is right hemisphere damage, there appears to be a removal of the normal integration of self with body: the body is reduced to a compendium of drives that are no longer integrated with the personality of the body’s ‘owner’.

3. A fragment of fiction written in the objective omniscient (from Ernest Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants):

The girl stood up and walked to the end of the station. Across, on the other side, were fields of grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro. Far away, beyond the river, were mountains. The shadow of a cloud moved across the field of grain and she saw the river through the trees.
‘And we could have all this,’ she said. ‘And we could have everything and every day we make it more impossible.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I said we could have everything.’
‘We can have everything.’
‘No, we can’t.’
[…]
‘Come on back in the shade,’ he said. ‘You mustn’t feel that way.’
‘I don’t feel any way,’ the girl said. ‘I just know things.’
‘I don’t want you to do anything that you don’t want to do -’
‘Nor that isn’t good for me,’ she said. ‘I know. Could we have another beer?’
‘All right. But you’ve got to realize –’
‘I realize,’ the girl said. ‘Can’t we maybe stop talking?’

4. One of the many times Tolkien wrote in the first person as the translator of The Red Book of Westmarch (from the first chapter of The Hobbit):

This is a story of how a Baggins had an adventure, and found himself doing and saying things altogether unexpected. He may have lost the neighbours’ respect, but he gained — well, you will see whether he gained anything in the end.

The mother of our particular hobbit — what is a hobbit? I suppose hobbits need some description nowadays, since they have become rare and shy of the Big People, as they call us. They are (or were) a little people […]

5. An example of the first person subjective omniscient point of view from George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind:

I have been asked to tell you about the back of the north wind. An old Greek writer mentions a people who lived there, and were so comfortable that they could not bear it any longer, and drowned themselves. My story is not the same as his. I do not think Herodotus had got the right account of the place. I am going to tell you how it fared with a boy who went there.

He lived in a low room over a coach-house; and that was not by any means at the back of the north wind, as his mother very well knew. […]

[…] when young Diamond woke in the middle of the night, and felt the bed shaking in the blasts of the north wind, he could not help wondering whether, if the wind should blow the house down, and he were to fall through in the manger, old Diamond mightn’t eat him up before he knew him in his night-gown.

[… thirty-four chapters later …]

It was very soon after this that I came to know Diamond. I was then a tutor in a family whose estate adjoined the little property belonging to The Mound. I had made the acquaintance of Mr. Raymond in London some time before, and was walking up the drive towards the house to call upon him one fine warm evening, when I saw Diamond for the first time. He was sitting at the foot of a great beech-tree, a few yards from the road, with a book on his knees. He did not see me.