a question for writers or anyone else

[rinhail]

The other day me and my sister had a disagreement about the linguistics of third person point-of-view. Is it acceptable to write from one characters perspective in the form of third person point-of-view? I believe you can (one of my fanfics is written in that way) but my sister refuses to agree. She believes if it's from one characters perspective

Comments

[varices]

Yes, you can write in third-person but still not be "seeing in their eyes." First person places you within the head of the narrator only--we can only see from their perspective. There is such a thing called third-person limited which focuses on one character, or a set of characters, and seeing from only their situation. Quite a few books can do this. An example of this would be The Dragonbone Chair, and even the Foreigner series by C.J. Cherryh assumes us in the perspective and viewpoint of Bren Cameron but not within the first person. We are allowed to get into the head of the character and see things from his perspective but his alone. We see when a character interacts it is, "Bren Cameron thought, Bren Cameron saw."

Many books do this when they wish to provide more context outside of the character but still be limited to one or two characters rather than multiple. We are in the third view point but we are not omniscient, etc, in all regards. This third person limited started becoming popular during the time of Modernism when we were putting into question the role of the narrator and his reliability.

I would argue that third person limited offers more freedom than first person but is still restricting yourself to a single character or perspective. So you can tell your sister that an English major, who has been studying literature for four years now, gives the okay to write in third person limited. c: Also, if she has read Harry Potter--that is written in third person limited as well, if I can remember.