Third person near is the closest-to-standard perspective there is. Among the big three- first person, third person omniscient, and third person near- it’s a slightly-more-removed version of the first, the common default of the second (I’ll explain this in a moment), and literally the third. As I mentioned recently, it’s what I write in, and it’s what many stories, particularly more modern ones, use. This custom is not without reason. Third person near is remarkably versatile, allowing the modern interest in a character’s internal life to have easy play with a little less external restriction than first person. In light of this fact, then, today we’ll be going over some aspects of the perspective, its relationship to other perspectives, its sliding scale of reliability, its relationship with reality, and its relationship with detail; as it turns out, a lot is going on under the hood to make third person near so useful.

Relationship to Other Perspectives

Third person near has an odd relationship with both of the other two common perspectives (first person and third person omniscient), as well as a whole train of sub-perspectives trailing along behind it. It provides much of the same facility of character as first person; in fact, the difference between them is remarkably small. Both take a single-person (at a time) view of the world, seeing the story through one set of eyes. Both are calculated to provide immense intimacy with that singular character, at least under most circumstances, and both have the oft-exploited potential to get literally inside his head. If I had to choose one perspective to convert a third person near book into, it would almost certainly be first person. They are, in truth, twins.

Third person omniscient, on the other hand, remains quite distinct from third person near. Third person omniscient, rather than mirroring third person near, contains it. Omniscient perspectives generally include a collage of third person near perspectives. Some, eschewing to peer into their character’s heads, largely avoid this. Many, however, present a number of intimate perspectives blended into one, perspective which would each alone be third person near; when one of these perspectives dominate, the line blurs, and third person omniscient can become in effect an expansive third person near. As Wood states¹, “As soon as someone tells a story about a character, narrative seems to want to bend itself around that character… to take on his… way of thinking and speaking.”

Aside from its close, nigh-overlapping relationship with first person and third person omniscient, third person near has its own ducklings, variant perspectives that all fundamentally lie within its borders. Stream of consciousness, for instance, is a form in which the thoughts of the perspective-character appear without filter, where the author presents not a polished assembly of their character’s thoughts but a carefully disorganized, carefully impulsive stream of their thoughts and intent, their perceptions and feelings. It’s an exaggeration of the common third person artifice of incorporating the central character’s thoughts straight into the narration, the author apparently removing the barrier of authorial existence. Of course, everything in this description is a bit off-kilter as a description; the author isn’t removing a barrier or pressing deeper into the character’s perspective. He’s manufacturing it. The appearance, though, of stripping away the artifice, that’s the point and intent of stream of consciousness.

Scale of Reliability

The idea of the unreliable narrator has a very modern, very artistic feel to it. It’s an idea intimately connected to third person near, almost more than first person, and one that has more nuance, even in principle, than might appear at first. The question, after all, is not just how unreliable your narrator is but how unreliable your reader’s understanding of what the narrator sees will be. In other words, there are two axes: the narrator’s unreliability and the unreliability of the reader’s perception.

The first axis is simple. Perspective characters, when not detached by time (Jane Eyre) or by some other form of distance which renders them at least as impartial as the author (the out-and-out narrator could fall into this category), are prone to have faulty understandings of the world around them. They can see maleficence where only forgetfulness resides, prejudice instead of cultural misunderstanding, kindness instead of manipulation. These character are, in a sense, like us: myopic, seeing only a small part of a very large world. That most of the fictional world they exist in exists only in relation to them and their surroundings is part of the illusion, not a repudiation of this nature, at least when well executed.

The second axis is more complicated. In stories with an unreliable narrator, the question arises of how well the reader understands the narrator and how well he understands the truth of the world the narrator shows him, how well he sees it despite the distortion. Think of it like looking at the world through glasses. An unreliable narrator is a faulty set of eye, whether they’re short-sighted, far-sighted, miraculously blurry at all ranges, have terribly night vision, are perpetually squinting to the point of near-blindness, or maintain near-painful levels of tunnel vision, possibly all at once. This axis is the question of how good the glasses are, whether the narrative corrects the narrator’s vision when it shows the world to the reader, and how perfect, imperfect, explicit, or implicit that correction is.

Simply having an unreliable narrator does not mean the reader’s understanding of the story and its world will necessarily be unreliable, though often it does necessitate some small shakiness. Stories can tell the truth even through a liar. To quote Wood again, “We know that the narrator is being unreliable because the author is alerting us, through reliable manipulation, to that narrator’s unreliability. A process of authorial flagging is going on; the novel teaches us how to read its narrator” (section 4). By teaching us to understand the perspective of the unreliable narrator, the story teaches us to filter that perspective through that understanding to get at the truth. It’s a good exercise, good practice for the perpetual necessity of doing this in real life, but it does mean that stories don’t usually present a truly unreliable world, even with their unreliable narrator².

Relationship with Reality

One aspect of fiction that we, as authors, must contend with is this: it’s fiction. And yes, I did just throw a tautology at you, but like many tautologies, it’s one that is worth remembering. When you or I write a story, that story isn’t a report of something that happened, something with a few billion unmentioned factors ranging from the exact temperature of the tea that (unnoticed) man in the corner of the grocery story had three days ago to the vast history of cardboard boxes to the precise quantum orientation of the particles making up the sword the main character discarded and how those particles were affected by the electromagnetic interplay they had with the smith’s hammer. Even including all the numinous knowledge floating around in our heads and whatever notes, discarded drafts, and ‘so-that-happened-off-page’ memorandums we’ve compiled, the story is much smaller than our world and yet contains everything that is the world of the story. Zooming in on a character’s innermost thoughts is as much creating them as discovering them, whatever illusion the process of creation may draw over us, whatever the reader may perceive in the aftermath.

Third person near creates an illusion of historicity by adopting the same general perspective we get from viewing real life; it creates an illusion of reality by adopting an appearance of the intimacy we have with our own thoughts. These remain illusory, but to the reader they must seem for a moment real, glimpses of a secondary creation which, however nonexistent it is outside the pages, nonetheless provides, even in nonexistence (unknown even to the author), the backdrop for the story they see.

Perception, Characters, and Detail

One aspect of a truly ‘near’ third person near is that everything in it is seen from the perspective of the singular character acting as the point of view character. The implications of this are an integral part of the perspective, an integral part of its advantages and disadvantages. Let’s consider this from two perspectives: characterization and description (detail).

When it comes to characterizing its point of view character, third person near is incredibly powerful. The story, after all, is filtered through his perception, physical and mental. Every detail you choose to include is one that the character, implicitly, chooses to include; every detail you leave out, implicitly, is one he didn’t care about (we’ll talk about this more in a moment). Let’s look at an example, pulled from an early chapter of my current project (this is only the second draft, so expect some imperfection- particularly with how little context I’m going to be giving).

“Satya stepped forward, towards the melee on the other side of the tents, willing himself to claim a part in the tale, to enter into the battle, to mark this the first night in a hero’s journey, and his knees began to shiver, to buckle.”

Satya’s perspective here is peculiar to his character. His character is what determines certain phrases: “claim a part in the tale… enter into the battle… mark this the first night in a hero’s journey”. His perspective determines how the story appears; what the sentence says speaks almost more to who he is than what’s happening to and around him. I’ve included his thoughts, not merely as faux-dialogue demarcated by ‘he thought’ or (in my conventions) italicization³, but as an integrated part of the text. It’s Satya who thinks “I want to claim a part in the tale”; transposing this to third person (or providing the illusion of transposition, as this was composed in third person originally), I include it as a part of the text.

The third person near perspective, though, is not purely the character’s perspective. I, as the author of the above, made choices regarding how I described it in order to convey information to you the reader. ‘Towards the melee on the other side of the tents’ isn’t really Satya’s thought; hopefully it doesn’t break his voice, but it’s certainly a departure therefrom. As an author, I can choose to zoom in on his thoughts, to withdraw, to show instead of his thoughts his actions- “his knees began to shiver” rather than “I daren’t”-, to show what happens around him in a detail he isn’t consciously cataloguing- “melee” for instance, a word he might apply later but which in the moment would probably be the much simpler ‘that’ (in his language, which being fictional and fragmentary does not at this moment actually have a ‘that’). I’ve given him a word, put it in his mouth, and the word may be accurate to his thoughts but it doesn’t originate therefrom⁴.

This gets us to the other peculiarity of third person near that I wanted to address: description. Third person near, in unapplied principle, shows only the details that the main character notices; a strict application will limit that even to the character’s thoughts and conceptions at the moment. That’s not what the vast majority of narratives do, though. The author knows certain details need to be communicated; he knows also that the main character has no need to communicate them or is conceiving of them as fleeting associations, nonverbal ideas that are impossible to put on the page without translation.

Think about it this way: when you get out of the bed in the morning, do you think about the color of the wall across from you? Sure, you see it; if you were asked, you’d immediately identify the color- red, let’s say. But your internal monologue didn’t say ‘red wall’; you just saw it, perceived its existence without reiterating it, and moved on. Life is full of a thousand such details, most irrelevant to the author. A handful, though, matter. Look at my example above. Satya sees fighting on the other side of the tents, but if you were to actually here his thoughts at the moment, ‘melee on the other side of the tents’ would never appear, not even in translation. ‘That over there’ would, perhaps, or maybe he’d just have the visual impression playing out before him, a mélange of associations and emotions and concepts that hasn’t quite coalesced into words before it gets shoved out of the way by the next thought.

How do authors get away with showing details their characters don’t conceive of? How about the detail which the character doesn’t even register in the moment, bits of scenery which the author needs to place in the reader’s mind but which the character never notices?

After we discard the (legitimate but difficult) option of living within the incredibly small boundaries of a strict third person near perspective, we have three paths to the forbidden details in our descriptions. First, they may be crystallizations of the conceptions and ideas the character had, turning ‘that’ into  ‘melee’ and ‘over there’ into ‘the other side of the tents’, turning vague associations into words accessible to and comprehensible by the reader. Second, the details may be ones the character didn’t notice, didn’t conceive, but which he could have. The author here simulates the noticing, describing the details in accord with the character, describing them as if the character has seen them even if he didn’t. Third, the details may be productive of the experience the character received. These details maybe one the character didn’t and wouldn’t notice, but they are calculated to produce in the reader the sensation, emotion, or association the character received in that time and circumstance. Thus, they are true to the perspective in effect, whatever their truth in technicality.

Conclusion

Today has been, as I think you’ll realize, mostly a mash of different rambles on aspects of my preferred point of view style. Third person near is a truly versatile choice, but we must remember its limits. The immediately preceding paragraph, about details, is the one I’ve been considering for the longest, actually. I’ve read a lot of third person near stories, and one thing that always makes me double-take, which jars me out of the book, is the story suddenly intruding a detail that doesn’t fit with the character its perspective ostensibly sticks to. Now, sometimes that’s my fault; sometimes I’m reading a story intentionally written in third person omniscient and due to my own habits I’ve defaulted to assuming it’s third person near (sometimes an easy mistake, given their relation). Other times, though…. Well, better safe than sorry.

God bless.

Footnotes

1 – How Fiction Works, section 6. Wood’s book is one I’ve only read part of (I started it last night, give me a break) but am finding quite intriguing and insightful. Caveat- having read farther into it, I must warn that it uses some remarkably explicit language regarding sex, though for purpose entirely aside from titillation.

2 – I’m not sure of the literary merit of presenting a truly unreliable view. From a theological perspective, the world has an objective truth, one the unreliable view will not in its nature contain, being inherently subjective. On the other hand, reality is full of subjective narratives and worldviews; our own thoughts are essentially this, conformed only by God’s grace to reality, perpetually running off in directions which would make us unreliable narrators indeed of our own lives, even leaving aside the problem of finite knowledge and memory. Thus a truly unreliable view could be presenting reality; the reality, though, would be of a person’s thoughts on reality, not of the reality the thoughts were upon. Maybe someday I’ll try it.

3 – E.g. This text written for the occasion (and over-burdened with italics because I kept myself from using all of my usual thought-integration methods):

The swords were certainly sharp today, he thought. Parlous close together too. The next man had a scimitar. Ow. He looked down. That explain why I fell. Not having a calf anymore would do that. I will die with honor.

4 – Quoting Wood (whose work in large part prompted this section): “Thanks to [third person near] style, we see things through the character’s eyes and language but also through the author’s eyes and language. We inhabit omniscience and partiality at once. A gap opens between author and character, and the bridge—which is [the third person near] style itself—between them simultaneously closes that gap and draws attention to its distance” (section 10). Substitutions made to account for differing terminology; blame any inaccuracy on me.