QUOTE(Salamon2 @ Sep 7 2006, 04:27 PM)
OFF Topic: What book is it? I'm curious cause I want to read something in my spare time, and I'd thought I'd try a third person omniscient for once.
Two books by two of my favorite authors are in TPO (if you want to abbreviate it as that): Southern Cross by Patricia Cornwell and Skeleton Man by Tony Hillerman. I've liked Cornwell's work in first person, and Hillerman usually works in third-person limited (the POV limited to his 2 main characters, Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, who are detectives who often work together). I just had a lot of problems with these particular TPO efforts, probably because TPO tends to make the reader (IMO) more aware of how the author pulls strings in the plot to maneuver the characters into the right locations at just the right time so that all the plot elements happen when they're supposed to. Did that make sense? I mean, think about real life. You don't know what's going on in other people's heads, nor what they're doing (necessarily) when they're not around you -- but in TPO that's what happens -- you're watching various characters do and say things that other characters can't know about, so the issue becomes when and where will A discover what B has said, or when will C discover what D has done, and how will all those things impact A, B, C, D, plus any other characters. As a reader, I start noticing the mechanics of how the story is put together more in TPO than in other POVs. In TPO you pretty much lose the focus of having a point-of-view character through whose eyes the reader sees the action. To me, with no focal character, it's harder as a reader to identify with
any character in particular.
Wow that ended up longer than I thought it would. Point of view is something I've been thinking about a lot recently, not only because I attempt to write fan fiction (with mixed success) but moreso because JKR's use of third-person limited POV is a large part of maintaining the "mystery" in Harry Potter. Harry is the focal character, and since we view almost everything (except what JKR chooses to tell us otherwise) through Harry's eyes, we see what we believe he is seeing. The big issue is whether what Harry thinks he sees is really what's happening; in many cases, we've discovered that while Harry thought one thing was happening, something else was going on instead.
Okay, back to the "subtle H/Hr moment" topic
