How to Write a Novel - Chapter 3 by Dr Koshy AV

 We look at setting with different eyes. Different points of view. They say while teaching beginners, first-person, second-person, third-person, et al, to infinity, if you could only figure that out. They say don't use the second person. A writer who always believed in breaking rules was Samuel Beckett. 

So he wrote in his novella Company this haunting section:

"The light there was then. On your back in the dark the light there was then. Sunless cloudless brightness. You slip away at break of day and climb to your hiding place on the hillside. A nook in the gorse. East beyond the sea the faint shape of high mountain. Seventy miles away according to your Longman. For the third or fourth time in your life. The first time you told them and were derided. All you had seen was cloud. So now you hoard it in your heart with the rest. Back home at nightfall supperless to bed. You lie in the dark and are back in that light. Straining out from your nest in the gorse with your eyes across the water till they ache. You close them while you count a hundred. Then open and strain again. Again and again. Till in the end it is there. Palest blue against the pale sky . You lie in the dark and are back in that light. Fall asleep in that sunless cloudless light. Sleep till morning light."

http://timothyquigley.net/vcs/beckett-company.pdf

You can call it lyrical, you can call it poetry, you can call it prose, you can call it prose poetry, but the p(o)int is the way he uses the second person, not often used but used so well here you do not notice the difference, as you too are being used by it now by me, as in the hands of an adept you can use any 'person' and make it work, whether first, second, third or third, second and first or all mixed up. 

First person - I, we.

Think: Arthur C Clarke's title - I,Robot.

Think: God to Moses - "I AM THAT I AM."

Think: Treasure Island by R L Stevenson

"

"The Sea-chest

 

LOST no time, of course, in telling my mother all that I knew, and perhaps should have told her long before, and we saw ourselves at once in a difficult and dangerous position. Some of the man's money—if he had any—was certainly due to us, but it was not likely that our captain's shipmates, above all the two specimens seen by me, Black Dog and the blind beggar, would be inclined to give up their booty in payment of the dead man's debts. The captain's order to mount at once and ride for Doctor Livesey would have left my mother alone and unprotected, which was not to be thought of. Indeed, it seemed impossible for either of us to remain much longer in the house; the fall of coals in the kitchen grate, the very ticking of the clock, filled us with alarms. The neighbourhood, to our ears, seemed haunted by approaching footsteps; and what between the dead body of the captain on the parlour floor and the thought of that detestable blind beggar hovering near at hand and ready to return, there were moments when, as the saying goes, I jumped in my skin for terror. Something must speedily be resolved upon, and it occurred to us at last to go forth together and seek help in the neighbouring hamlet. No sooner said than done. Bare-headed as we were, we ran out at once in the gathering evening and the frosty fog."

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/120/120-h/120-h.htm - (Chapter 4 of Treasure Island. first paragraph)

I must admit, we see in the above passage a beautiful use of I and we for narrating a story in the first- person, the same fluent way I have used I and we in this sentence!

Second person, - You singular and you plural.

Read again carefully what you were given above.

Third-person - He, she, it, they. 

How to use it and first-person together: "In the depths of the sea it had crept into the cruel pot. For hours, in the midst of its enemies, it had breathed secretly. It had survived the Frenchwoman’s cat and his witless clutch. Now it was going alive into scalding water. It had to. Take into the air my quiet breath."

How to use he, she, it, and they together: "His aunt was in the garden, tending whatever flowers die at that time of year. She embraced him and together they went down into the bowels of the earth, into the kitchen in the basement. She took the parcel and undid it and abruptly the lobster was on the table, on the oilcloth, discovered.

“They assured me it was fresh” said Belacqua.

Suddenly he saw the creature move, this neuter creature. Definitely it changed its position. His hand flew to his mouth.

“Christ!” he said “it’s alive.”

His aunt looked at the lobster. It moved again. It made a faint nervous act of life on the oilcloth. They stood above it, looking down on it, exposed cruciform on the oilcloth. It shuddered again. Belacqua felt he would be sick.

https://evergreenreview.com/read/dante-and-the-lobster/ (The excerpts are taken from Beckett's Dante and the Lobster, in his collection of short stories More Pricks than Kicks.)

Enough to start you off with, whether you are singular or plural and a he, she or they.  You can't be an it but you can be it. Isn't it? Now go for it and start using these points of view. 

More about point of view and narration in the coming chapter. In depth and profundity, more is there to come and be written. The absent point of view is to write without bringing in an I, he, she, they, we, you, you as is being done here in these last three sentences, by the way. Except that, as in deconstruction, I used them all in the last or previous or preceding sentence to say I did not use any of them!