by Gail Kavanagh

Created on: February 20, 2008

Just about everyone knows the story of Goldilocks and the three Bears - how Goldilocks came upon a house in the woods, tried out the chairs (and broke one), tasted the porridge (and ate one) and lay on the beds (and went to sleep). Then the bears came home and Goldilocks ran away.

What can a simple tale like this tell us about POV (Point of View)? Quite a lot.

If the story is told from Goldilocks' point of view, we approach the house with her, go inside, move around and finally go to sleep on Baby Bear's bed. When the bears turn up, we run away with her.

From her point of view, she will justify herself for going into the house and messing with the Bears stuff' - she was lost, she was hungry, she was tired. When she runs away, it is because she is frightened that the bears will eat her, not because she is ashamed of her actions, because we see things from her point of view.

But if we read the story from the Three Bears' point of view, we will go out with them for a walk before breakfast, and return with them to find someone has been in the house. Now we have a very different angle on the situation. If we see the scene though the eyes of Baby Bear, for example, we see a broken baby bear chair and empty bowl of porridge. This is likely to make us feel very sad. When we find a stranger asleep in our bed, we are likely to take a very Baby Bear view of it, and want the intruder turfed out immediately.

If we are looking at the scene through the eyes of Father Bear, faced with fixing the damage and explaining to Baby Bear why someone could just walk in and break his chair, we are likely to be very angry, and frighten the intruder into running away.

If we are seeing it through the eyes of Mother Bear, coming home to find her home violated by a stranger, no matter how blond and cute, we are likely to feel frightened and start worrying about security.

Just from this example, you can see that when the point of view changes with each character, it changes for the reader as well.

Point of View can often be a judgment call - readers expect to see the story from the hero's point of view and the hero is expected to be right in his judgment of the villain. If we switch to the villain's point of view we have a very different story.

For example, in Charlotte Bronte's classic novel Jane Eyre, the story is told entirely from the point of view of the young, naive governess Jane. She falls in love with Mr Rochester, her employer, and learns that he keeps his first wife locked away in the attic

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