Who is telling this, how much can they see, and how much should we believe them? Three questions, and the third is where the analysis is.
The options
| Perspective | Access | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| First person | One mind, from inside | Intimacy, and doubt: we only get their version |
| Third limited | One mind, from outside | Closeness with room for irony |
| Third omniscient | All minds | Scope, and the risk of distance |
| Third objective | No minds | The reader does all the inferring |
| Second person | Puts you in it | Rare, unsettling, hard to sustain |
Reliability
Ask: does the narrator’s account match what other characters do? Do they insist on something too often? Would somebody else in the story tell it the same way?
An unreliable narrator turns reading into judging, which is the most advanced thing a reader does.
Focalisation, briefly
Even in third person, a text usually sees through somebody. In Moon of the Crusted Snow the story stays close to Evan; what he does not know, we do not know. That choice is why the collapse arrives as rumour and silence rather than as explanation — and it is a choice, not a limitation.
Perspective in drama
A play has no narrator, so perspective is built out of who is on stage, who is absent, and who gets a soliloquy. Ask which characters never get to speak alone. In Romeo and Juliet, the answer is worth a paragraph.
Curriculum connection
B1.5
extend understanding of texts, including increasingly complex texts, by making appropriate connections between the ideas in them and personal knowledge, experience, and insights; other texts; and the world around them (e.g., recall similar structures of texts previously read to help in analysing a new text; with a partner, role-play a mock interview about a public personality’s reaction to a recent profile in a print or online source; explain how something in your own experience or background has influenced your understanding of a character’s behaviour)
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B2.3
identify a variety of elements of style in texts and explain how they help communicate meaning and enhance the effectiveness of the texts (e.g., determine the differences in meaning or effect when the same symbol, such as the sun or water, is used in two different poems; compare the images, symbols, and literary devices used in an Aboriginal myth and a Greek myth; explain how a mythical allusion in a piece of literature or an advertisement enhances the theme or message; determine what effects are achieved in works by two different authors, one of whom uses a variety of sentence types while the other does not)
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