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Different points of view (POVs) affect stories by shaping the readers’ understanding of the feelings and actions of the characters (Mulcahy & Gouldthorp, 2016). Since every character in a story has their own perspective, it is the narrator who impacts the reader’s opinion of the characters and events as they unfold. Also, POVs affect stories by determining the amount of information the reader gets as the story unfolds. For instance, with a third-person omniscient POV, the reader can see everything before the other characters do, which gives them forewarning about other events which unfold later on.

I prefer a third-person omniscient POV over first person POV since it allows the narrator to freely move about the plot of the story because they are not limited to one character’s point of view as it is in the case of first person POV. Thus, this allows the narrator to give the reader several viewpoints throughout the story making it more interesting to read.

I enjoyed reading “Bullet in the Brain” more since the POV used allows the narrator to explain the thoughts and feelings of the main character from an all-knowing perspective. For instance, when Anders is struck with a bullet that injures his brain, the narrator describes memories of events throughout his life as if the narrator has been in Anders life all through. For instance, the narrator says, “He did not remember his first lover, Sherry, or what he had most madly loved about her before it came to irritate him…” (Wolff, 1996).

References

Mulcahy, M., & Gouldthorp, B. (2016). Positioning the reader: the effect of narrative point-of-view and familiarity of experience on situation model construction. Language and Cognition, 8(1), 96-123.

Wolff, T. (1996). Bullet in the Brain. The night in question, 200-206.