Talk about viewpoint is unusually prone to conflation, because “point of view” is made to carry person, distance, reliability and the identity of the narrator all at once, so that four different problems receive one diagnosis. This file separates them before the argument begins.
The working definition
A viewpoint shift is a deliberate change in the consciousness through which the narration is filtered, made at a structural boundary such as a section or chapter break, in a book built to hold more than one vantage. The decision underneath it is the grant: the allocation to a character of access to the reader’s identification. A shift is an event in the text and a grant is a commitment of the whole book; one grant may produce forty shifts, or one. Every grant has four properties a writer should be able to state for each viewpoint character: its recipient (who holds it), its extent (how much of the book), its onset (when it begins) and its termination (whether it ends, and whether the reader knows). Most advice about viewpoint concerns the recipient alone; structural failures occur in the other three, which are properties of the whole book and so are invisible while drafting forward and obvious in an audit.
Viewpoint decisions are made at the scale of the sentence, the scene, the chapter and the book, and this chapter works at the last: who has a viewpoint at all, how many, and in what proportion. A manuscript can be sound at the first three scales and wrong at the fourth, with five cleanly anchored viewpoints spread so thin that nobody is known.
Head-hopping, the structural shift and omniscience
Head-hopping is workshop slang for a change of viewpoint inside a continuous scene, without a boundary, so that the reader’s access moves from one character’s interior to another’s in the middle of the action. The usual teaching sets it against the structural shift made at a boundary, and calls the first an error and the second a design. That teaching describes a convention of roughly the last century, not a property of narrative. Middlemarch, Anna Karenina and Tom Jones move between minds inside a single scene constantly, with effects nothing else could produce, and in them the movement is omniscience: narration by an intelligence with free access to any mind, exercising it. The discrimination that matters is whether the narration has a stable convention that the movement belongs to. A mid-scene change of mind is head-hopping when the book has established a limited narration and then leaks; it is omniscience when the book has established a mobile narration and then moves. The reader’s unease comes from the mismatch, not from the movement, and Failure Patterns treats the case at length.
Adjacent terms
Several neighbouring terms are needed throughout the chapter, and the table gives each with its relation to the viewpoint shift.
| Term | Meaning | Relation to the shift |
|---|---|---|
| Focalisation | Gérard Genette’s term for the regulation of what the narrative tells according to a perceiving position: who perceives, as distinct from who speaks (a word he chose after Brooks and Warren’s “focus of narration”) | What a viewpoint shift changes |
| Focaliser | Mieke Bal’s term for the character whose perception organises what is presented | The recipient of a grant |
| Narrator | The agent who speaks the narrative | Often unchanged across a shift |
| Person | First, second or third | Independent of focalisation |
| Narrative distance | How close the narration stands to the focaliser’s mind | A change inside one grant, not a change of grant |
| Reflector | Henry James’s word for a character through whom events are refracted without her narrating | The single-viewpoint architecture |
Two of the pairings cause most confusion in practice. Person is not focalisation: The Great Gatsby is told in the first person and mostly observes Gatsby from outside, while Mrs Dalloway is told in the third person from very close inside a succession of minds. Distance is not viewpoint: moving from She crossed the yard to Gravel. Not the grass, not today changes how near the narration stands without changing whose mind it occupies, and it is repaired as prose, while a viewpoint problem is repaired as structure.
What this chapter leaves to others
The crossing itself, the anchoring proper noun and the cost of each frame switch, belongs to The Transition (Chapter 5); where the break falls belongs to The Chapter Break (Chapter 6); the requirement that a plural architecture be declared early is stated in The Opening Pages (Chapter 9), and this chapter supplies its mechanism. How two narrators are made to sound different at the level of the sentence belongs to The Dialogue Exchange (Chapter 3); this chapter asks whether they notice, want and know differently. The relation between a narrating I and the younger self she remembers is a matter of time and belongs to Backstory and Flashback (Chapter 7). The cost of material that pulls attention from the main line, at the scale of a plot line, is the attention tax of The Subplot (Chapter 14), and the two chapters make one argument at two scales.
See also: the Reference definitions, with the full table of adjacent terms, including Chatman’s filter and slant.