Narrative Point of View

Passage from "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson

 

The children assembled first, of course. School was recently over for the summer, and they tended to gather together quietly for a while before they broke into boisterous play, and their talk was still of the classroom and the teacher, of books and reprimands. Bobby Martin had already stuffed his pockets full of stones, and the other boys soon followed his example, selecting the smoothest and roundest stones; Bobby and Harry Jones and Dickie Delacroix—the villagers pronounced this name “Dellacroy” — eventually made a great pile of stones in one corner of the square and guarded it against the raids of the other boys.

 

• First Person Protagonist

• Third Person Objective

• Second Person

• Third Person Limited

• Third Person Omniscient

Passage from Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

 

My name is Kathy H. I'm thirty-one years old, and I've been a carer now for over eleven years. That sounds long enough, I know, but actually they want me to go on for another eight months, until the end of this year. That'll make it almost exactly twelve years. Now I know my being a carer so long isn't necessarily because they think I'm fantastic at what I do.

• Second Person

• First Person Protagonist

• First Person Witness

• Third Person Limited

• First Person Retelling

Passage fromThe Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

 

You are amongst them, of course. Your curiosity got the better of you, as curiosity is wont to do. You stand in the fading light, the scarf around your neck pulled up against the chilly evening breeze, waiting to see for yourself exactly what kind of circus only opens once the sun sets.

• First Person Witness

• Third Person Objective

• Second Person

• First Person Protagonist

• Third Person Omniscient

Passage from The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

 

It's this detail, the untucked blouse forming a ducktail, that brings me back to myself.

 

"Prim!" The strangled cry comes out of my throat, and my muscles begin to move again. "Prim!"

I don't need to shove through the crowd. The other kids make way immediately allowing me a straight path to the stage. I reach her just as she is about to mount the steps. With one sweep of my arm, I push her

behind me.

"I volunteer!" I gasp. "I volunteer as tribute!"

• First Person Witness

• Third Person Limited

• First Person Protagonist

• Third Person Objective

• First Person Retelling

Passage from "Hills Like White Elephants" by Ernest Hemingway

 

He picked up the two heavy bags and carried them around the station to the other tracks. He looked up the tracks but could not see the train. Coming back, he walked through the barroom, where people waiting for the train were drinking. He drank an Anis at the bar and looked at the people. They were all waiting reasonably for the train. He went out through the bead curtain. She was sitting at the table and smiled at him.

"Do you feel better?" he asked. "I feel fine," she said.

"There's nothing wrong with me. I feel fine."

• Third Person Omniscient

• Second Person

• First Person Witness

• Third Person Limited

• Third Person Objective

Passage from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen, but as a lover he would have placed himself in a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer—excellent for drawing the veil from men’s motives and actions. But for the trained reasoner to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his. And yet there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory

• First Person Protagonist

• Second Person

• Third Person Omniscient

• First Person Witness

• First Person Retelling

Passage from Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney

 

You have friends who actually care about you and speak the language of the inner self. You have avoided them of late. Your soul is as disheveled as your apartment, and until you can clean it up a little you don't want to invite anyone inside.

 

• First Person Limited

• Third Person Objective

• Second Person

• First Person Protagonist

• Third Person Limited

Passage from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling

 

Something very painful was going on in Harry's mind. As Hagrid's story came to a close, he saw again the blinding flash of green light, more clearly than he had ever remembered it before-- and he remembered something else, for the first time in his life: a high, cold, cruel laugh.

Hagrid was watching him sadly.

• Third Person Limited

• Third Person Objective

• Third Person Omniscient

• First Person Protagonist

• First Person Witness

Passage from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald 

Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction — Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament.”— it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No — Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and shortwinded elations of men.

• First Person Protagonist

• First Person Retelling

• Third Person Omniscient

• Second Person

• First Person Witness

Passage from Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones

 

In the land of Ingary, where such things as seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility really exist, it is quite a mis-fortune to be born the eldest of three. Everyone knows you are the one who will fail first, and worst, if the three of you set out to seek your fortunes.

 

Sophie Hatter was the eldest of three sisters. She was not even the child of a poor woodcutter, which might have given her some chance of success. Her parents were well to do and kept a ladies’ hat shop in the prosperous town of Market Chipping. True, her own mother died when Sophie was just two years old and her sister Lettie was one year old, and their father married his youngest shop assistant, a pretty blonde girl called Fanny. Fanny shortly gave birth to the third sister, Martha. This ought to have made Sophie and Lettie into Ugly Sisters, but in fact all three girls grew up very pretty indeed, though Lettie was the one everyone said was most beautiful. Fanny treated all three girls with the same kindness and did not favor Martha in the least.

• Third Person Omniscient

• Third Person Limited

• Third Person Objective

• Second Person

• First Person Protagonist