Florida - Benchmarks for Excellent Student Thinking:
ELA.4.R.1.3
Identify the narrator’s point of view and explain the difference between a narrator’s point of view and character perspective in a literary text.
4th Grade Reading - Point of View in Literature Lesson
Point of View
Point of View
In narrative writing and poetry, the pointofview is the lens through which readers "see" the characters and events. Most stories and poems are written in either first-person point of view or third-person point of view. To determine a text's point of view, you must first determine who the narrator, or storyteller, is.
Point of View: FIRST PERSON
When a story or poem is written in the firstperson —
The narrator is telling the story from his or her own point of view. Everything the reader sees is through the "eyes" of the narrator.
The narrator is most often a character in the story, usually (but not always) the main character. Everything directly shared with the reader carries the opinions, thoughts, and feelings of only this one character.
The story is told with first-person pronouns like I, we, me, us, my, mine, and ours even outside of dialogue. Names and third-person pronouns (he, she, they, etc.) are used for any other characters the narrator describes.
Example:
The pronouns I, we, us, me, and our are used by the narrator.
The narrator is an unnamed character from whose point of view the story is told.
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Point of View: THIRD PERSON
When a story is written in the thirdperson —
The narrator is not a character in the story, but an unnamed speaker telling the story of a character or characters and the events that happen to him/her or them.
The narrator could be "all-knowing"—aware of all the characters' thoughts, feelings and experiences. Or, the narrator could know only the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of one or a few main characters.
The story is not told with first-person pronouns like I, although these pronouns are often used in the dialogue of specific characters. Instead, it is told with the names or descriptions of characters and pronouns like he, she, they, him, her, and them.
Example:
The names of both characters, Madeline and Sara, and the pronouns they, them, her, and their are used by the narrator to describe the characters.
The narrator is only a storyteller, not a character in the story.