Character perspectives can make a story more interesting, challenging, or surprising. One of the great things about literature is how it makes you empathize with characters.
However, what if you are faced with a story told from the perspective of a character whose values you don’t identify with? What if the character is the villain?
Storytelling benefits when writers know how to strike a balance between telling a story objectively from a character’s perspective without allowing their own authorial voice to intrude too much.
This can only work if the author puts alot of faith and trust in the intelligence of the reader. In this article, I discuss how character perspective can be employed to make storytelling more rich and interesting, and how it can be made to challenge readers' values.
To do so, I look at a few examples, including the 2001 movie The Others starring Nicole Kidman and directed by Alejandro Amenábar.
What is character perspective?
Character perspective means the point of view in which a story is told. I am sure you are familiar with the different types of narration:
First-person
Second-person
Third-person
In first-person narration, the story is told from the viewpoint of a character in a story using pronouns such as “I” or “we.” In second-person narration, the reader turns into the main character, and they are addressed as “you” in the story. In third-person perspective, the narrator is omniscient and addresses the characters by their name or uses pronouns such as “he,” “she,” and “they.”
However, character perspective is more than just the type of narration. It is storytelling that colors the world through the eyes of specific characters while trusting that the reader is able to read between the lines or discern objective reality from the viewpoint of said character.
In addition to this, leveraging character perspective allows you to add all sorts of ironic turns and twists in your storytelling. Considering this, I have divided the function of character perspectives into three categories:
Ironic perspectives
Perverted perspectives
World altering perspectives
With ironic perspectives, we read a story faithfully from the point of view of one character, only to find out that there’s a twist at the end. In perverted perspectives, we are told a story from the point of view of a narrator who cannot be trusted or who is unreliable.
The character could be a villain, a serial killer, a mentally ill person, or someone else who violates the human moral code so deeply that we could never identify with them. A good example is the narrator — Humbert — in Nabokov’s Lolita.
World-altering character perspectives are ironic perspectives with a twist so great that they force us to reconsider our worldview or values. An example of this would be the movie The Others (2001). Let’s take a more in-depth look at each one of the three perspectives with the relevant examples.
1. Ironic perspectives
Ironic perspectives are usually associated with a twist that you do not see coming. This is basic storytelling that involves situational irony. It has even been applied even in the most allegorical of tales. A good example is the famous allegorical tale called “The Appointment in Sammarra.” This is an ancient tale based in Baghdad.
The narrator of the tale is Death. The tale goes as follows:
A merchant in Bagdad sent his servant to the market to buy provisions. The servant encountered death, who made a threatening gesture. He was scared but was determined to avoid his fate. He borrowed a horse from his master and galloped at full speed to Samarra to avoid the Death that threatened him there in Baghdad.
Later, the merchant went down to the market and saw Death there. He asked Death why she made a threatening gesture toward his servant. Death explained that it wasn’t a threat. It was simply a surprise as she had an appointment with that very servant tonight in Samarra.
The story is short and to the point. We are dealing with three character perspectives here — those of the master, the servant, and Death. The master is the mediating perspective that gives the twist and denouement to the short story.
The narrator is tactful in the way that he deals with each perspective in this rather short story. We are made to feel that indeed the servant was threatened by Death. He comes across as smart and quick-thinking on his feet when he decides to flee the city where he has been threatened by Death.
However, the conversation between Death and the master reveals that the servant is really doing nothing more but rushing to the fate that he believes he is avoiding. This is a good example of perspective being used to breathe life, humor, and freshness into a common adage — that is, there is no escaping Death.
2. Perverted perspectives
Perverted perspectives are character perspectives that are unreliable and twisted in some sort of way. A good example, as I mentioned earlier, would be Humbert, who is the narrator in Lolita.
Readers are forced and challenged to read a story from the point of view of characters who are either mentally ill or characters who have warped morality of some sort. There are several modern novels that do so.
One of the more popular are stories told from the perspective of serial killers. They include books such as:
The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson
American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis
Slob by Rex Miller
Psycho by Robert Bloch
The Sandman by Miles Gibson
However, here we will focus on the perverted perspective from a rather famous poem, namely, Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” (1842). The poem is about a wealthy and aristocratic duke boasting about killing his wife for smiling too much at random men and even the sunset.
The poem begins as follows:
That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now; Fra Pandolf’s hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
The duke has had his wife killed and is now in complete control of her image and memory. His God complex is shown in the lines “Fra Pandolf’s hands worked busily a day, and there she stands.” Fra Pandolf the artist is simply reduced to a pair of hands. Hands hired by him to complete a project. He is making it clear that he owns the artist, the product, and the woman herself.
And why exactly did he kill his wife? Let’s hear him tell us in his own words:
She had
A heart—how shall I say?— too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
Sir, ’twas all one! My favour at her breast,
The dropping of the daylight in the West,
The bough of cherries some officious fool
Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
She rode with round the terrace—all and each
Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
Or blush, at least.
He goes on to clarify that she thanked men too well, as if these men were ranked at the same level as his long aristocratic lineage and pedigree:
She thanked men—good! but thanked
Somehow—I know not how—as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody’s gift.
. . .
Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together.
This type of perspective is that of a man who is deranged and controlling. He becomes jealous of his wife smiling at “the drooping of daylight in the West.” In other words, his wife should not enjoy sunsets as much as she enjoys being in his esteemed company.
He wants full possession of his wife to the point that he has her killed and reduced to a work of art that he has hidden behind a curtain. Now, only those he wishes to see her can after he decides to draw that curtain. This reveals a sense of deep insecurity, which is masked by his power, arrogance, and courtesy. We often hear about the "objectification of women" without clear examples of what it means. Here we have a literal example of a woman being killed and reduced to an artistic commodity.
The author narrates the whole poem from the Duke’s perspective. He doesn’t interrupt to tell us that this is an unwell and immoral man. He does not introduce any characters to object or to act as a foil to the duke’s perverted point of view.
This is a brave choice. The reader is left alone to confront a set of values that are foreign to common human morality. To achieve this type of effect, the author must be skilled enough to draw the line between what they approve as an author and what only belongs to the character's perspective. You the author must also be brave enough to occupy the skin of that character and truly speak from their point of view.
Get in touch for help in editing and proofreading your book |
3. World-altering perspectives
World-altering perspectives push alternative views so strongly and convincingly that it forces readers to change or at least question their deeply held internal values. They are a mix of ironic perspectives and perspectives that don’t represent conventional morality.
However, they are unlike perverted perspectives, which objectively counter our sense of human morality. Instead, they present us with a new and different way of looking at the world as well as our place in it and our relationship with others.
A good example of this would be the film The Others (2001). The story follows Grace Stewart (Nicole Kidman). Grace is a devout Catholic who lives in a large, isolated mansion with her two young children — Anne and Nicholas. Both children suffer from a rare condition called photosensitivity. This means if they are exposed to sunlight, they may die. As a result, Grace keeps the house in perpetual darkness with heavy curtains and strict rules in place against opening doors.
After her previous servants disappear, Grace hires three new caretakers: Mrs. Mills, Mr. Tuttle, and a mute girl named Lydia. Almost immediately, strange things start happening in the house and the children register them. Anne claims to see ghostly figures, including a boy named Victor. Grace herself hears noises and notices doors opening and closing on their own. Grace along with viewers is convinced that the house is haunted.
As the film goes on, it is slowly revealed that Grace and her children are indeed being haunted — not by ghosts, but by the living. Grace killed her children in a fit of madness before taking her own life. Their traumatic death means that they are all trapped in the purgatory of a haunted house, with them being the ghosts.
Here is a scene where it is revealed what Grace has done. The living family has a seance to communicate with Grace’s children, where both mother and children are forced to confront the awful truth:
We see that the "ghosts" that Grace saw all along were the living family trying to move into the house. The story works on many levels. It examines the nature of human trauma. It has been said that people remain affixed or petrified in the circumstances of their unhealed trauma and never grow past it. Grace and her children are stuck in limbo reliving the lives they had before the traumatic event and refusing to come to terms with what happened.
Ghosts caught in limbo can be seen as a metaphor for how humans deal with unhealed trauma that is too painful or difficult to confront. More than that, it also forces us to question the nature of our reality. How real is it compared to alternative realities? How much is reality anything more than what our mind constructs?
So when writing your own characters, think of how you can employ perspective to enrich your story and make your readers think and question their deeply held beliefs. If you need help or advice on how to go about developing character perspectives, schedule a free call or appointment with one our experienced developmental editors at EminentEdit: Get In Touch!
Cite this EminentEdit article |
Antoine, M. (2025, January 08). Leveraging Character Perspective | Examples & Tips. EminentEdit. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/leveraging-character-perspective-with-examples |
コメント