point of view

First Take: In reference to story-telling generally, (a) the position from which events are observed or presented, and/or (b) the narrative technique used to signal that position, such as “first-person,” “third-person limited,” and so forth. 

Deeper: I always underline that meaning (b) above is important: it asks us to not seeing meaning (a) as unduly fixed or literal. Narrative journalists quite commonly shift their angle of vision, their access to a subject’s interior thoughts, and even their own position in chronological time.  (Compare entry on free indirect discourse). 

Moreover, as I discuss in Chapter 3 especially, it’s useful to understand the full meaning of (a) above. That is, if you think about a painting or photograph, it’s impossible to imagine that any image lacks a point of view, because the phrase is structural: there is always a position from which things are seen. But as in a painting, we implicitly reconstruct that position from how things are seen. Thus certain colloquial terms we use for point of view–“omniscient,” or “fly on the fall”–really have very limited application to narrative journalism.