Points of View is an anthology and technical manual that categorizes short fiction by the narrative distance between the storyteller and the action. Editors James Moffett and Kenneth R. McElheny organize the collection into eleven distinct rhetorical modes, beginning with interior monologues and subjective letters, moving through detached third-person reporting, and ending with the omniscient perspective. Each section provides curated stories by authors such as Anton Chekhov and Ambrose Bierce to demonstrate how specific grammatical choices and narrative constraints alter the reader’s relationship to the events and characters.
Students of creative writing and literary theory use this text to study the mechanics of voice. The book provides a technical framework for understanding how a shift in persona or focalization changes the delivery of information within a plot. Readers finish the collection with a specific vocabulary for identifying narrative reliability and the structural limitations of different vantage points. It serves as a practical guide for writers who want to deliberately select a narrative angle to achieve a particular psychological effect.
- Published
- 1960
- Language
- EN
