In a series of craft notes, we’re illustrating Point of View. If you want to see the first step in this process, click here to see Alice Munro’s version, in First Person Informant.
Here is third person omniscient, where we allow the reader to see the motivations of all the characters. It can suffer from much telling and less showing, and can require much more space but conveys the entire “universe” in the room. Third person omniscient uses the language of the author, not the character – it is often highly literate. It can often sound like D. H. Lawrence or Gabriel García Marqués – not necessarily a bad thing. In this case we make the family profoundly unhappy and at odds with each other.
After supper the husband, desperate to get out of the house, leans over his daughter, touches her glossy hair, and asks, “Want to go down and see if the lake's still there?” He shoots a glance at his wife, both oppressed by and tired of her constant, unending censure. His daughter looks up into his face, thinking, “Yes! Me and my Dad, on our own.” She leaps up out of the chair, seeing his face open up like a hot pink sun of pleasure. The mother, hunched over her sewing at the table watches them, a sense of shame and isolation – the two are always locking her out. She's sewing under the dining-room light, the tiny piecework that redeems her as a mother, recutting an old suit and a plaid wool dress, struggling with matching seams flawlessly. She thinks, even though her daughter is ungrateful and cares nothing for the effort, that her daughter will at least be decently dressed in the fall term. Even in this propitiatory act, she has punished her daughter, making her stand for multiple fittings in these wool straightjackets in the hot, dripping air of the room. The husband, breathing in the deep sweet night air of freedom steps out the door with his bounding daughter. She reaches up to clasp his hand – a secret bond against her mother as much as for the two of them. On the veranda she glances to the left to the little screened porch at the end, to see her brother once again clamoring like a cracked bell for attention. He kneels on his bed and presses his face against the screen and begs mournfully, “Bring me an ice-cream cone!” He knows that she will ignore him, that his father will forget, that he will lie there alone in the dark. The daughter, feeling her heart close like a fist, calls back, “You will be asleep,” and she refuses to look back at him.
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