When we named our podcast Third Person Limited, it seemed like a just-cutesy-enough reference to a somewhat literary term: the specific point of view where the narrator is an unseen observer who describes a story’s action and one character’s thoughts and feelings. Plus, there are two of us hosting the show, making the listener the third person, and none of us are omniscient. It might not be the best play on words, but when all the other good podcast titles are already in use, you take what you can get.
Before we even finalized this title, though, we had already leaned into discussing narrative perspective, after an encounter with Nobel prize-winner Han Kang’s Human Acts, which employs the rare second-person narrative perspective in one of its alternating point of view (POV) sections. This means the novel’s narration says you instead of she or I, starting from the first page:
Looks like rain,” you mutter to yourself.
What’ll we do if it really chucks it down?
You open your eyes so that only a slender crack of light seeps in, and peer at the gingko trees in front of the Provincial Office. As though there, between those branches, the wind is about to take on visible form. As though the raindrops suspended in the air, held breath before the plunge, are on the cusp of trembling down, glittering like jewels.
We quickly realized, though, that while the you perspective is unusual, it’s not the scarcely seen snow leopard it’s made out to be. Our first guest on the podcast, writer Dan Eastman, shared both poems and a short story he’d published using the second person POV. Within weeks of recording with Dan, we found ourselves bumping increasingly into stories, novels, even six consecutive paragraphs in a New Yorker film review from 2015 written from your POV.
We also quickly realized that the rules everyone learned about narrative perspective back in English class are, to be blunt, not true. Or at least, they fail to describe the reality of narrative perspective, which often fluctuates, fades in and out, or occupies liminal spaces between defined categories. Given the polyphonic nature of writing fiction, and our growing understanding of theory of mind, none of this is surprising. Second-person perspective seems riper for subversion than other POVs, since its unfamiliarity may make it particularly unsustainable over longer stretches of time. Only part of Human Acts uses the second person, as the novel switches narrators across chapters. Ditto Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, whose prologue uses you, but only after a page has gone by, then lurches into its 18th century plot via third person POV.
Caroline Kepnes’ novel You, the basis for the Netflix series of the same name, technically employs the first person, but some sources call it a second-person novel, since in the protagonist’s internal monologue employs you more than I. The effect is unsettling, not only by placing the reader inside the story but also inside a stalker’s obsessive crosshairs. Writer Kelly Magee, another guest on our podcast, wrote “Caring for Your Local Woman” like a conversational guide for family members of women who have been victimized in some way. There is one quick use of I, but mostly it’s you — and it could be a singular you, or the collective you of an airport security sign that says, “Please remove your shoes.”
It’s okay to be overwhelmed at first. You have questions. Why is it always women? Local to where? The answers will come, but they’ll only prepare you to ask better questions. Local women know what you’re really after. You asked how to care, but what you mean is how to keep. They’ll be honest. They can’t tell you that.
Focusing on how you is disrupted as a consistent POV reminds us of all the ways other perspectives don’t live up to their billing. Sometimes it’s made obvious, as when John Fowles drops the third-person veil and introduces himself directly to the reader several chapters into The French Lieutenant’s Woman; or David Foster Wallace’s footnote in the posthumous and otherwise third-person omniscient The Pale King, declaring himself the real-world author and producing his actual home address (and fake Social Security Number) as proof. It’s not just contemporary subversions that stretch POV rules past their breaking points, either. Consider Frankenstein, written over 200 years ago, with its epistolary framing device in first-person but addressed to you, Captain Walton’s sister; those letters then give way to another first-person narrative — spoken by Frankenstein, but written by Walton, then “corrected and augmented” by Frankenstein again.
We’re tempted to imagine the mad scientist poring over Walton’s manuscript by the light of a tallow lamp, scratching out errant dialogue with a worn-out quill as the frigid arctic ice groans and cracks around him. It may be more likely that Mary Shelley inserted those lines about Frankenstein personally revising the text to buttress the appearance of authenticity attached to his story, being as it was narrated to another who then transcribed it from memory. Either way, the perspective turns hazy amid the overlapping voices. When the novel says, “I beheld the wretch,” whom should we believe is I?
These are not flaws, but intentional acts by authors to shape the content of their fictions and the forms those stories come to us in. Yet if breaking the “rules” of narrative POV is so common, do we even have rules at all? A better question might be, what are we learning when taught these alleged rules? After all, they’re immediately disrupted, undermined, turned inside out. It would seem the handouts we got in high school explaining what third person is could have been avoided.
A better mode of understanding might be to see these perspectives as frameworks for interacting with literature, and not a series of categories into which one should sort various texts. Comprehending how narrative perspective operates is more useful than matching novels to a list of criteria, like learning the underpinnings of historical trends is better than memorizing who won which battles. This is a frightening notion for education traditionalists, who valorize facts and figures and prefer neat conclusions over the kind of gray areas that spawn critical thought and can eventually challenge the hierarchies on which their philosophies stand.
Banning books is the logical endpoint of this mindset, the fantasy that simply disappearing a set of discrete objects that someone finds undesirable will in turn eliminate the ideas contained therein. But books belong to a system of thought that implicates empathy, understanding, and critical thinking; they are part of a way of interacting with the world that does not succumb to snipping off supposedly objectionable outgrowths here and there, any more than the ocean is rendered safer by capturing a few sharks. It’s also why efforts to demonize Critical Race Theory in education fell short — a conceptual framework for understanding race isn’t a thing you can lock inside a few hundred pages and then throw away the book.
As we speak, of course, disconcertingly effective efforts continue apace to eradicate modes of thought deemed anathema by our authoritarian leaders. George Orwell imagined a world where totalitarians made dissent impossible by removing the words that would enable people to conceptualize it, a fictional polity Stephen Miller probably dreams about creating. Nonetheless, you can never eliminate “woke” if woke isn’t something that can even be defined.
Likewise, a slippery narrative POV reminds us that storytelling — and hence life, the world, and everything in it — is a muddle of competing and conflicting interpretations, a swirl of nuance that can’t be hemmed into the binary categories that autocrats depend on. They need a world made up of men and women; good and bad; immigrant and “real” American; regular people and criminals; us and them. The next time you encounter a novel whose perspective seems cagey or elusive, consider it a small but necessary act of dissent against those who would force the rest of us to live in their puny, constrained worldview.
