How to Do Point of View: Third-Person Omniscient
The novel knows the characters better than they know themselves.
Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women begins as follows:
“Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.
“It’s so dreadful to be poor!” sighed Meg, looking down at her old dress.
“I don’t think it’s fair for some girls to have plenty of pretty things, and others none at all,” added little Amy, with an injured sniff.
“We’ve got Father and Mother, and each other,” said Beth contentedly from her corner.
These four sentences give the reader a lot of information. It’s near Christmas. These four sisters aren’t expecting to receive presents. One is grumbling while behaving in a way that might be considered “improper,” one is unhappy with her clothing, one is noting the unfairness of the situation while affecting a mannerism, and one is content.
Arguably, everything we need to know about the March sisters—specifically, the dominant character traits that will follow each of them through the rest of the book—is summed up in this brilliant opening.
But all of this information is coming from an external source: the novel’s description. We do not know what any of the March sisters are thinking. We don’t even really know what they’re feeling; all we get are a few verbs that imply emotion. Grumbled. Sighed.
From these four sentences alone, the reader can guess that Little Women takes a third-person omniscient point of view. The confirmation comes a few pages later, when the novel reveals itself to have a narrator:
As young readers like to know ‘how people look’, we will take this moment to give them a little sketch of the four sisters, who sat knitting away in the twilight, while the December snow fell quietly without, and the fire crackled cheerfully within. It was a comfortable room, though the carpet was faded and the furniture very plain, for a good picture or two hung on the walls, books filled the recesses, chrysanthemums and Christmas roses bloomed in the windows, and a pleasant atmosphere of home peace pervaded it.
Who is describing this room? Not the March sisters. We don’t see any of this from their perspective. Little Women is told from a third-person omniscient narrator’s point of view, as if the novel were watching the story unfold and then telling us what it saw.
Not all third-person omniscient narrators address the readers directly, or use the pronoun “we.” However, you can always identify a third-person omniscient point of view by asking yourself: whose perspective is this coming from?
Let’s look at a more contemporary example, from Katarina Bivald’s The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend:
The strange woman standing on Hope’s main street was so ordinary it was almost scandalous. A thin, plain figure dressed in an autumn coat much too gray and warm for the time of year, a backpack lying at the ground by her feet, an enormous suitcase resting against one of her legs. Those who happened to witness her arrival couldn’t help feeling it was inconsiderate for someone to care so little about their appearance. It seemed as though this woman was not the slightest bit interested in making a good impression on them.
Who is describing this strange woman? It can’t be one of the other members of Hope, because the people who see her arrive are described as well. That leaves only the omniscient narrator, who gives us a visual image of the new visitor while also passing judgment: her coat is inappropriate, her figure is plain.
We don’t know what this strange woman thinks of herself. Over the course of the novel we learn more about her—and her new neighbors—but only from the perspective of this all-seeing narrator. The third-person omniscient novel presumes to know the characters better than they know themselves; the character puts on a coat, but the novel informs us that the coat is both too warm and too gray.
When writing from the third-person omniscient point of view, your challenge is to maintain the omniscient perspective while simultaneously ensuring your readers feel close enough to your characters to sympathize with them. That first paragraph of The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend doesn’t really help us bond with the strange woman in the gray coat, but the second paragraph starts to give readers a sense of who this woman is and why we might be interested in what happens to her:
Her hair was a nondescript shade of brown, held back with a carelessly placed hair clip that didn’t stop it from flowing down over her shoulders in a tangle of curls. Where her face should have been, there was a copy of Louisa May Alcott’s An Old-Fashioned Girl.
Ah, we understand. She is a reader, like us. The narrator uses the next few paragraphs to bring us even closer, describing the way her gray eyes occasionally glance up from her book, as if she is waiting for something—or, as we quickly learn, for someone. The omniscient narrator has literally pulled us into this woman’s story, and now we want to know what happens next.
The third-person omniscient novel is most effectively contrasted with the third-person limited novel, which uses third-person pronouns but shows us the world through the characters’ eyes, not the omniscient narrator’s. More on that to come—and until then, don’t read a third-person novel without considering whose perspective the story is coming from.
Nicole Dieker is a freelance writer, a senior editor at The Billfold, and a columnist at The Write Life. Her debut novel, The Biographies of Ordinary People, is forthcoming May 2017.
