Of course, before going on I need to clear something up, which is that 'point of view' is not about the use of first-person, second-person, third-person, and plural forms of these only. Or about implying it by using the passive voice to leave it to be guessed by the reader the way I ended the last paragraph in the last chapter. Beckett often does that, it is a very common way of writing notes for drama, a kind of shorthand and maybe he brought it in from that or carried it from fiction to drama, not quite sure which and it doesn't matter. Suffice it to say it opens one more door.
A young, new writer or an old one who should be mature but need not be in technique, and still may write great literature, may use the point of view not being very clear about it. This leads to mixed narratives that need to be looked at to be learned from. Let us think of the actual process of composition and demystify it. When a writer writes he is there in his writing, plus a narrator, plus the character or characters in whom also one finds him, and only then do they have in them something of their own. Few writers reach the point where the character refines the author out of existence in himself, to misquote Joyce. Dickens and Beckett admit to their folly by giving David Copperfield Dickens' initials in reverse in the novel of the same name and Beckett does the same in More Pricks than Kicks by naming his character Belaqua Shuah, S B in reverse, but this is just the tip of this particular iceberg.
Let us look at it more carefully. There is the author. Then there is a narrator, sometimes, who may be the author at that particular place in time, or not, or partly him. There is a character who may have something of the author in him or not. The latter two may or may not be the same person. Clear? No? That is exactly what I mean too. If the author knew what he was doing he would be clear., it would be clear but when he does not or allows mix-ups it won't be, whether it is a bad habit with him or immaturity, youth, or he pulls it off successfully. The best writers learn by doing and not necessarily from a textbook so all this is allowed bu meanwhile it may help you to see what I mean by looking at Hard Times or More Pricks than Kicks in slightly more detail. Unless I proof-text things, they mean nothing.
Here is the beginning of Chapter 2 of "Hard Times."
"Thomas Gradgrind, sir. A man of realities. A man of facts and calculations. A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for anything over. Thomas Gradgrind, sir—peremptorily Thomas—Thomas Gradgrind. With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to. It is a mere question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic. You might hope to get some other nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind, or Augustus Gradgrind, or John Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind (all supposititious, non-existent persons), but into the head of Thomas Gradgrind—no, sir!
In such terms Mr. Gradgrind always mentally introduced himself, whether to his private circle of acquaintance, or to the public in general. In such terms, no doubt, substituting the words ‘boys and girls,’ for ‘sir,’ Thomas Gradgrind now presented Thomas Gradgrind to the little pitchers before him, who were to be filled so full of facts.
Indeed, as he eagerly sparkled at them from the cellarage before mentioned, he seemed a kind of cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts, and prepared to blow them clean out of the regions of childhood at one discharge. He seemed a galvanizing apparatus, too, charged with a grim mechanical substitute for the tender young imaginations that were to be stormed away.
‘Girl number twenty,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, squarely pointing with his square forefinger, ‘I don’t know that girl. Who is that girl?"
To break it up for you - the first paragraph is the character thinking. We are in his head. This is omniscient narrative as the narrator can see inside the heads of his characters, and whether it is a limited omniscience or not is not clear yet for those who have read the novel till this juncture, but in the next paragraph, we need/see/notice the narrator. He interpolates himself with a "no doubt". He is not to be doubted, in other words, unlike Thomas Gradgrind. And we see why when he suddenly uses three similes/metaphors why we should side with the narrator. He says the students are to the owner of the school "little pitchers soon to be filled with facts." A disconcerting image. Then he compares Gradgrind, ideally named, to a "cannon...prepared to blow them clean out of the regions of childhood at one discharge" bringing in power, colonialism and imperialism to education and the classroom, as negative things, and lastly, he uses the metaphor of a "galvanizing apparatus" for Gradgrind, and by using the adjective "grim" with "mechanical" and "substitute" which will take the place of "imagination", storming it away, he brings in irony against the industrial revolution with its mechanization and dehumanization.
The narrator thus assumes a voice that is clearly connected to the author here and intrudes on us telling us not to think well of the character that he himself has created, in that particular time-frame in the novel. Whether this is 'showing' or wise I leave you to decide, but for me while it is not "showing" Dickens' savage similes and metaphors redeem it.
Show and not tell, they say.
This brings me to Henry James and the point of view. If you read me carefully, you'd understand that there is something called the omniscient (all-knowing) point of view, the limited omniscient point of view and first-person point of view, second-person point of view, third-person point of view, all in singular and plural etc., and all limited, so far, plus point of view in absentia by using the passive voice.
There can also be shifting points of view as I noted up above, from character to narrator in the instance I gave you, for example.
But which is the best one? According to many the third person point of view or he or she. This is where Henry James plays an appreciable trick. He brings in the fallible narrator or the narrator whose point of view cannot be taken for granted as the gospel truth. Take "The Ambassadors" and Lewis Lambert Strether. He goes to Europe to search for a missing American, a young man Chad, sent to look for him by his parent, the woman whom Lambert is engaged to, and also going to appease his own curiosity about Europe, from the New World (America), and is told by his fiance that Chad Newsome the young man is in the clutches of a femme fatale from France, who is obviously a witch, a harridan, a shrew and an older woman who is a temptress and all that. When he meets the femme fatale finally, he finds she has a beautiful daughter Jeanne, a bad husband reportedly, is called Marie de Vionnet, and does not seem anything like a femme fatale. She charms him completely and against the hints thrown out by his friend Maria Gostrey, an American woman who knows Europe well but no longer holds rigid Boston Brahmin, puritan morals, Lambert is about to go back at the end of the novel to report to his fiance that her son is not in anyone's grip and is only friends with the perfectly winsome and morally upright Marie.
However, then at almost the very end of the novel he finds out that Chad is having a full-blown affair with Marie and everyone, almost, except he, knows about it and thinks nothing much of it. The word cougar did not yet exist, but one thinks of it in 2020, in relation with the novel and of Chad as only a cad, in relation with the decadence of Europe which is what Henry James has been getting at circuitously, that behind all the culture is only a superficiality that finally is only about, God forbid, sex an older woman wants with a younger man whom she seduces and keeps in her pocket, therefore, as he is handsome and American, for her own interests and the whole relationship has nothing to do with love on her or his part.
Henry James is the master of the fallible narrator or the untrustworthy/unreliable one whose views change in the course of the novel or are all along wrong as in the case of the Turn of the Screw. There are always two turns at least, in Henry James's screw(s), if not more.
Feminists may or may not like the novel and Baudrillard points out North America became even more decadent in his book on it, on the U.S.A, but for students of point of view Henry James' novels are compulsory reading, both the two I mentioned already and "Portrait of a Lady", to start off with. So are his prefaces, - like Shaw's prologues are - (interference by me), as Ezra Pound pointed out.
You could start by reading the preface to "The Ambassadors."
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