NARRATORS and POINT OF VIEW
Activities
Writing from a point of view
Describe the first five minutes of a typical working day/morning from the POV you have been allocated
(1st, 2nd, 3rd)
A
I pulled the gauzy curtainacross the mirror so Iwouldn’t have to look at myface, then scrunched mynose. No one else hadcurtains over their mirrors. It was embarrassing.
B
C
“Booked” by Kwame Alexander
Why couldn’t your dad be a musician like Jimmy Leon’s dad or own an oil company like Coby’s? Better yet, why couldn’t he be a cool detective driving a sleek silver convertible sports car like Will Smith in Bad Boys? Instead, your dad’s a linguistics professor with chronic verbomania* as evidenced by the fact that he actually wrote a dictionary called Weird and Wonderful Words with, get this, footnotes.
* verbomania [vurb-oh-mey-nee-uh] noun: a crazed obsession for words.
In the elementary school spelling bee when you intentionally misspelled heifer, he almost had a cow. You’re the only kid on your block at school in THE. ENTIRE. FREAKIN’. WORLD. who lives in a prison of words. He calls it the pursuit of excellence. You call it Shawshank. And even though your mother forbids you to say it, the truth is you HATE words.
Voices in the park: by Anthony Browne
- View the reading of the story and consider the effect of using different first person POVs.
- Rewrite one event from the story from a Third-person omniscient point of view.
Characterisation through 1st Person POV
It was time to take Victoria, our pedigree Labrador, and Charles, our son, for a walk.
Some scruffy mongrel appeared and began to bother her.
Oh dear! Where had he gone?
You get some frightful types in the part these days.
Charles, “Come here at once!”, I said. “And come here please, Victoria.”
The tell tale heart: by Edgar Allen
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! yes, it was this! One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture — a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees — very gradually — I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.
Now this is the point. You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded — with what caution — with what foresight — with what dissimulation I went to work! I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him.
Discussion:
- What are the clues that tell you the narrator is an unreliable narrator?
- Why has the author chosen to use an unreliable narrator to tell this story?
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
There was a garden fork sticking out of the dog. The points of the fork must have gone all the way through the dog and into the ground because the fork had not fallen over. I decided that the dog was probably killed by the fork because I could not see any other wounds in the dog and I do not think you would stick a garden fork into a dog after it had died for some other reason, like cancer for example, or a road accident. But I could not be certain about this.
My name is Christopher John Francis Boone. I know all the countries of the world and their capital cities and every prime number up to 7,507.
Eight years ago, when I first met Siobhan, she show me this picture
😕
and I knew that it meant ‘sad’, which is what I felt when I found the dead dog.
Then she showed me this picture
😊
and I knew it meant ‘happy’, like when I’m reading about the Apollo space missions, or when I am still awake at three or four in the morning and I can walk up and down the street and pretend that I am the only person in the whole world.
Then she drew some other pictures
😉😠😔😯
but I was unable to say what these meant.
Discussion:
- What are the clues that tell you the narrator is an unreliable narrator?
- Why has the author chosen to use an unreliable narrator to tell this story?
