Literacy

Point of View: Common Core Reading Literature Standard 6 Demystified

What is point of view in literature?

Point of view is how the author lets you see the story. The author determines whether the story is told in first, second or third person and whether we are told exactly how a character feels or if we will need to infer their emotions. The author decides what will be revealed by dialogue vs. the author’s narration.

First person: The author uses pronouns such as “I,” “we,” “my,” and “mine.”

Second person: The author uses pronouns such as “you,” “your,” or “yours.”

Third person: The author uses pronouns such as “she,” “he,” “her,” “his,” “they,” and “their.”

What about the reader’s point of view or perspective?

Readers also have a point of view, but this is not part of the text structure, it is part of the reader response. If you wanted to combine both the literary term of point of view with the reader response term of point of view, one might have a definition for point of view as the following:

How the reader, author, and characters view the events, actions, and words within a story.

Here we can examine how the concept of point of view is developed from kindergarten through grade 5.

K – Know author and illustrator and what they do

1^st – Different characters can tell the story (author may be a character or not)

2^nd – Characters may view events differently (have a different point of view). Dialogue reveals points of view.

3^rd – Personal points of view may be different from the narrator or the characters.

4^th – Compare and contrast points of view. Distinguish between first and third person narration.

5^th – Narrator’s influence over perception of events

Sample Textual Analysis Across the Grade Levels

So, let’s actually do a textual analysis, and examine what point of view could possibly look at each grade level. I am choosing two stories to examine at different grade levels. The first story is  Frog and Toad Together: The Dream by Arnold Lobel. In this story, Toad has a dream in which he is a fabulous performer on stage. Frog is sitting in the theatre. Each time Toad shows off, Frog gets smaller and smaller, until he can’t be seen or heard. At the end, Frog wakes up Toad, and Toad is relieved that Frog is there in the correct size and voice. The second story is My Rotten Redheaded Older Brother by Patricia Polacco. In this story, Patricia and her brother are very competitive with each other and her brother always seems to win. He enjoys taunting her with his prowess. One day Patricia actually beats her brother, but it comes with a cost, as she passes out. Ultimately, she learns that he loves her because he is so concerned about her, and that maybe he isn’t so rotten after all.

Kindergarten: Who is the author of this story? What is the job of the author? Who is the illustrator? (In this case, they are the same: Arnold Lobel.) How is it different when the illustrator is also the author? You could connect to the comprehension study of making mental images and address the objective that The illustrator (and the reader) create mental images based on the words in the text and from their background knowledge or schema.

1st Grade: Who is telling the story? Technically, the author, Arnold Lobel tells the story, but he is not in the story himself. He has created two characters. Most of the story is from the point of view of Toad. Although Frog is in the dream, he is not telling the story because he is not having the dream. At the end, both Frog and Toad tell the story, as you hear both of their ideas and thinking.

2nd Grade: This text selection is not the best example for second grade standards, but I’ll make a stab at it. Although Frog and Toad see the showing off part differently, it is all through Toad’s perspective. I supposed one could contest that Frog sees himself as wonderful because the voice in the dream comes from his head and it always announces his greatness. Also, Toad has a desire to be amazing for Frog or perhaps show him up,  but also realizes that it jeopardizes his friendship , hence the reason why Frog disappears. However, we never actually get Frog’s perspective on the dream since he didn’t really experience it. So, I am going to stick to the end for the second grade standard. After Toad wakes up from his dream Frog is there. Toad views this event with relief that Frog is okay and that he is there. Toad is unsure about the difference between his dream and reality as evidenced by him asking if it is really him. Toad also feels especially thankful for Frog coming over after having felt the loss of him in his dream. Frog views this event as a normal part of their everyday lives together. When Toad expresses thankfulness for him coming over, Frog responds with, “I always do.” Frog has not gone through an emotional experience in this story, and therefore, is very matter of fact. He also doesn’t feel the strong sense of gratitude that Toad feels.

3rd Grade: Toad makes a decision in his dream to stop bragging about his greatness once he loses Frog, however, he didn’t stop showing off until it was too late. If this hadn’t been a dream, Toad would have been too late. From my perspective, Toad should have realized sooner what he was doing to Frog. From reading this story and the rest of Frog and Toad Together, I think that Frog is the smarter of the two because he is always teaching Toad how to do things and about new words. They both like to spend time together, and they both seem to think it is a good friendship. In fact, the author has written many stories about their time together. The characters don’t directly say anything to put each other down, but from my perspective, Toad has some issues about feeling “less than” Frog, which makes it so their friendship is not made of two equals. Toad doesn’t realize that he lacks confidence, but from my perspective that is a big problem for him.

4th Grade: For this grade level, you will need another book to compare narrations. I will first start with Frog and Toad. This story is told in third person narration as evidenced by the author always using Frog and Toad’s names and the pronouns he and they. The author is not one of the characters. In My Rotten Redheaded Older Brother by Patricia Polacco, the story is written in first person narration and the author is actually one of the characters in the story (this makes it a personal narrative). The author uses her own name in the story and refers to that character as I, my, and me.

5th Grade: Since Patricia Polacco is both the author and the character within the book, she has a very different perspective on Richie than he would if he told the same story. She greatly influences how the reader perceives Richie. He is more of a villain from her perspective (at the beginning). She describes him as a weasel with glasses and doesn’t understand how her grandmother could even love him. Even the title of the story clearly states that her brother is rotten. Since the narrator wants us to see her brother as awful, each competition between the two shows Richie as mean and taunting. Patricia is made to look innocent and tortured – more of a victim if you will. She deserves to beat Richie.

Some other authors and stories that may be helpful for studying point of view include Junie B. Jones, A Series of Unfortunate Events, Patricia Polacco stories, Jon Scieszka, and Chris VanAllsburg. Versions of The Three Little Pigs and The True Story of the Three Little Pigs and Red Riding Hood and Wolf Story are great for introducing the idea of point of view (that a story can be told from more than one perspective).