4 - Viewpoint

Summary

There were two men in my father’s chair.

(Coasting, Jonathan Raban)

The preceding chapters have outlined ways in which narrative viewpoint is construed and linguistically expressed at the level of major narrative spaces of a story. However, viewpoint phenomena of more partial nature pervade narrative discourse at every level. There are several terminological issues which require clarification at this point.

‘Viewpoint’ and ‘perspective’ are the broadest terms in use, with respect to both macro-level phenomena (such as narratorship, temporal and spatial anchoring of the narrative, et cetera) and micro-level phenomena, which are often talked about in terms of Genette’s () concept of ‘focalization,’ or ‘who sees.’ Much of this terminology evokes visual access to situations, though the nature of focalization may include other ways in which the narrative is aligned with a fictional subjectivity, whether of a narrator or of a character. To avoid the visual implications, Toolan () proposes to talk about ‘orientation’ instead, which in turn evokes spatial configuration of some kind. All three terms, ‘focalization,’ ‘orientation,’ and ‘viewpoint,’ in fact cover a broad range of phenomena having to do with the specific use of narrative space topology – temporal, spatial, perceptual, and the like.