Point of View in Narrative

Every scene gets filtered through somebody. A dinner scene told by the daughter who's furious about an empty chair reads nothing like the same dinner told by the father who's hiding what he knows. Point of view is that filter: it decides which thoughts you get handed directly and which ones you only see from outside, as gesture and silence.

The camera has three common positions. First person uses 'I' and gives you one mind from inside, with everything else guessed at from speech and behavior. Third person limited uses 'he' or 'she' but still sits behind one character's shoulder, so you get that character's thoughts and only the surface of everyone else's. Omniscient pulls back further, moving between minds or commenting from above, sometimes knowing things no character does. On a passage, the first job is locating where the camera is parked, because that tells you what counts as fact versus what counts as one person's read on things.

Point of view connects directly to purpose and bias. A narrator never announces what they're leaving out, so a passage limited to one character's mind is already shaping the story by what it withholds about everyone else. This matters most when the narrator is also a character with a stake in events, including an older narrator looking back at a younger self with more confidence than knowledge. Questions often test whether you'll mistake the narrator's voice, or even the author's choices, for the simple truth of what happened.