JKR's narrative strategy (Was: Whose point of view ?)

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 106967

Sylvia wrote:
It wouldn't matter if David Copperfield had twenty times the 
(considerable) number of characters Dickens employs, the story 
would still be seen entirely from David's POV, just as the HP books
are seen entirely from Harry's.  
> 
Adi responded:
Harry Potter books aren't written from Harry's point of view. They 
are written from the author's bird-eye-view, if one may call it that. 
Remember the first chapter of Book4 where the point of view shifted 
to the action in the Riddle house though Harry wasn't there. Though 
Harry was dreaming all this, it wasn't written like that. First the 
action was presented, then it was told that Harry had also been 
dreaming about the incidents. If it had been written from Harry's 
point of view, it should have started with Harry sleeping on his bed 
la la la and then gone onto the Riddle House, as it happens with the 
many dreams Harry has in Book5. <snip>



Carol responds:
Adi is correct, but a lot more can be said on the topic from a more
technical standpoint. It's important to distinguish among different
types of narrative strategies because they affect our interaction with
and understanding of the characters. The Harry Potter books would not
provide the same reading experience if they were written in the first
person, which completely excludes the possibility of viewing events
from the outside or the occasional use of a different POV character.

"David Copperfield" is a fictional autobiography written from the
first-person participant point of view; the narrator and the
protagonist are the same person. The only distance between the
narrator and the main character is the amount of time that has passed
between the events and their reporting. The narrator depicts his
younger self sympathetically even when he's aware of his own faults.
He presents his own thoughts and feelings but is completely unable to
enter into any other character's minds--exactly like a real person. We
have to pretend, of course, that the narrator really could remember
events, including his own thoughts, in such detail. We excuse a
certain degree of subjectivity as natural and inevitable.

The HP books are a different matter. They are not told by the
protagonist as an adult from his own point of view. Such a device
would ruin the suspense JKR wants us to feel regarding Harry's
survival. They would also shift the focus from the events and
characters to Harry's mind and personality, emphasizing the
bildungsroman elements at the expense of the mystery and the epic
quest. A third-person narrator enables JKR to blend the three with no
one element dominating the others in the series as a whole.

The narrator of the HP books, unlike the eponymous David Copperfield,
is not a character but a voice telling the story in the third person
from the *limited omniscient point of view*, meaning that he or she
can tell the story either from the outside (as when the narrator tells
us in OoP that Neville, unknown to Harry, is also lying awake) or from
the POV of a few selected characters--usually but not always Harry.
The choice of Frank Bryce as what Henry James called "the central
consciousness" in the first chapter of GoF would be inexplicable if
Harry were the sole POV character. The dream sequence would have had
to be told through Voldemort, whose mind is connected to Harry's
through the scar, rather than through Frank's.

But a limited omniscient character can sometimes use a character other
than the protagonist (e.g. Vernon Dursley in SS/PS chapter one) or
report events without revealing the thoughts of any characters, as
when Dumbledore and McGonagall are waiting for Hagrid to deliver baby
Harry to the Dursleys. Note that even when the narrator is revealing
Vernon Dursley's thoughts, he or she is also able to report events
occurring outside Vernon's perspective--events happening out in the
street (or the sky) that Vernon doesn't see. In the next chapter, the
narrator objectively describes the photos in the Dursleys' living room
ten years ago and today and reports that Harry is asleep before
assuming his POV (SS/PS Am. ed. 18-19). Later in SS/PS (Am. ed.
190-91), the narrator in that scene is everywhere at once, reporting
the conversation of Hagrid, Seamus, Ron, and Hermione before shifting
to Hermione setting fire to Snape's robes. Although the entire scene
is presented more or less objectively, an argument could be made that
it's from Hermione's POV based on a single sentence: "A sudden ylep
[from Snape] told her that she had done her job" (191). What's certain
is that the observation is not Harry's; it's the limited omniscient
narrator's.

In GoF, JKR uses dreams and visions to enable Harry to enter
Voldemort's mind, which would be possible because of the scar
connection even if the narrator were confined to Harry's POV. But the
scar connection does not explain the narrator's ability to enter Frank
Bryce's mind in that scene any more than it explains the ability to
enter Vernon Dursley's in SS/PS chapter one. But the use of a limited
omniscient narrator who can occasionally enter minds other than
Harry's--and fortunately has done so before GoF--makes the scene
plausible. *Harry* is not necessarily in Frank's mind here, even
though he dreams about him. Much of the rest of the chapter is
background information on Little Hangleton presented by the narrator
without using *any* character's POV--not Frank's or Voldemort's or
Harry's. Not one of those characters is present to overhear the
conversation in the Hanged Man (GoF Am. ed. 2-4). It's reported from
an outside, "dramatic" perspective by the invisible, eavesdropping
narrator.

Interestingly, JKR apparently intended to switch from Harry's POV to
Draco's in the first draft of "Philosopher's Stone." The deleted first
paragraph of a typescript page on her site starts off with Draco's
reaction to Harry's entrance to the classroom, and she edited out a
dialogue between Draco Malfoy and Theodore Nott, presumably after she
decided to use Harry's POV whenever possible. Nevertheless, for scenes
that were essential to the story and could not be told from Harry's
perspective or told to him by another character (e.g. "Hagrid's Tale"
on OoP), the use of a limited omniscient narrator left open the
possibility of enter other characters' minds or even having no POV
character at all, as in GoF 1-4.

Equally interesting is the choice of characters whose minds the
narrator does not and perhaps cannot enter: Dumbledore, Snape, the
DADA teacher of the moment, Sirius Black, Petunia Dursley, and many
others. This limitation keeps us guessing about these characters'
motives and prevents us from knowing what's really going on to the
extent that these characters know it (or think they know it, since
even Dumbledore can be wrong).  It also aids in establishing a mystery
in every book since the clues and red herrings are always presented
from Harry's perspective (though by now we see more in them than he
does). And of course the normal but not exclusive use of Harry's POV
rather than that of an objective adult observer not only limits our
knowledge but distorts our perception of events and characters if we
allow Harry's frequent misinterpretations to become ours.

Almost everyone knows that a first-person narrator can be unreliable,
especially if he's young and naive. The classic example is
"Huckleberry Finn," whose interpretation of events clashed ironically
with the interpretation that Twain anticipated from an enlightened
adult reader. But a limited omniscient narrator can also be unreliable
 when he's reporting the perceptions of a character (usually but not
always the protagonist) rather than "the facts" (which themselves are
subject to interpretation by the characters and the reader--an
interpretation that can differ markedly from the narrator's as colored
by the character's). Nevertheless, a limited omniscient narrator is
useful--much less cumbersome than an omniscient narrator who could
clutter the story by reporting the thoughts of everyone from Crabbe to
Mrs. Norris, and much more plausible for the HP books than a
first-person narrator (Harry recording his thoughts and actions in a
kind of after-the-fact memoir, which would remove the element of
suspense regarding his survival against Voldemort and eliminate the
possibility of presenting background on the Riddle murders and similar
information that none of the regular characters could possibly know).

Any reader who's not convinced of the importance of POV should try
reading "Moby Dick," in which Melville discovered about a third of the
way through that telling the story from Ishmael's POV alone was not
going to work.

Carol, who didn't mean to write so much on this topic but considers it
very important