Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER in THE POINT OF VIEW The author who has mentally blocked out his story, determined definitely its objective point, and selected some, if not all, of the incidents which shall comprise the action, is confronted, before proceeding farther, with the problem of the point of view. Just what is meant by the phrase? In simple terms we may put the question thus: who is to be the supposed narrator of the story? We say of a story that it is written— from the point of view of a participant, of an observer, or of the author; that is, it is seen through the eyes of one of these. We must consider the disadvantages and advantages to the story of one or another of these points of view. Our range of selection is really wider than at first sight we should deem possible. The simplest and most obvious point of view is that of the chief participant. The story centres in him; he was concerned in all the important incidents. Thus we may imagine Cinderella recounting to her grandchildren the romantictale of her youth, the story of the crystal slipper. It is from this point of view that many of the world's famous stories, both long and short, have been written. To mention but a few at random, there are in English such novels, as David Copper- field, Lorna Doone, Jane Eyre, Treasure Island, and Robinson Crusoe. Many of Poe's short stories, such as The Cask of Amontillado, already cited in another connection, The Black Cat, and The Telltale Heart, are written from this point of view. A fine modern illustration (slightly modified by the. author) is Joseph Conrad's Youth. In the work of almost any voluminous writer of short fiction one may find examples of stories in this manner, though some writers have far more predilection for it than have others. Let us see what are its advantages and limit...