Showing Point Of View through a concrete example

I’m going to use an example that casts all the points of view that I know of, since seeing the real thing is mostly better than just verbiage about the real thing. Over the next few weeks I’ll use a Munro story to lay out (my version) of the opening scenes of a short story to illustrate POV. If you’re sufficiently interested you might want to collect the segments into a single document. This is the type of exercise that any emerging writer should try themselves, since doing can supplant academic understanding with an achieved craft.

We key from Alice Munro’s, “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” which she tells in first person.

First person is immediate, personal, appears to tell secrets that can't be observed, and can reveal interior and exterior detail. A first person narrator can be the protagonist or not, but is inherently unreliable since she has a vested stake in the outcome – but often the first person narrator is more mature, self-aware, and honest than one would expect. First person can be either Informant (can even be delusional) or Reminiscent (often highly reliable and even self-derogatory). Many authors find writing in first person natural, since the protagonist can tell the story directly to the reader, forming an expectation of a person-to-person bond – selling the story like it's being told in confidence from a real person to a confidant.

This is the original opening paragraph, in present tense and in first person. This first person is the Informant First, dictated by, among other things, the verb tense.

After supper my father says, “Want to go down and see if the lake's still there?” We leave my mother sewing under the dining-room light, making clothes for me against the opening of school. She has ripped up for this purpose an old suit and an old plaid wool dress of hers, and she has to cut and match very cleverly and also make me stand and turn for endless fittings, sweaty, itching from the hot wool, ungrateful. We leave my brother in bed in the little screened porch at the end of the front veranda, and sometimes, he kneels on his bed and presses his face against the screen and calls mournfully, “Bring me an ice-cream cone!” but I call back, “You will be asleep,” and do not even turn my head.

Before we get started, let's point out some of Munro’s craft in the story.

After supper my father says, “Want to go down and see if the lake's still there?” [ We know now there is a real relationship between father and child. ] We leave my mother sewing under the dining-room light, making clothes for me against the opening of school. [ Now we know that the family is poor, and expect loving parents doing their best. ] She has ripped up for this purpose an old suit and an old plaid wool dress of hers, and she has to cut and match very cleverly and also make me stand and turn for endless fittings, sweaty, itching from the hot wool, ungrateful. [ Mother knows that the child doesn't like home-made clothes and likely feels badly about not providing store-bought clothes. It is very likely that the child is a girl. ] We leave my brother in bed in the little screened porch at the end of the front veranda, and sometimes, he kneels on his bed and presses his face against the screen and calls mournfully, “Bring me an ice-cream cone!” but I call back, “You will be asleep,” and do not even turn my head. [ We understand that the brother is younger than the sister, that the time-frame could be from the mid-1800s to current day. Now we are asking why the father leaves the male child behind, why the brother sleeps on the veranda – is the summer so hot that children sleep outside? The boy is likely to be asleep – is he sick or only so much younger? We understand that there is a distance between sister and brother. ]