I have written twice about Point of View and telling a story from the First Person voice – of one of the characters. (First Person Elevates Fact-Based Tales, POV Changes Everything). Last Saturday’s East Valley Tellers of Tales guild meeting inspired this additional post on the topic.
Elizabeth Matson (newly elected President of the guild) told a great version of The Fisherman’s Wife, from the point of view of … wait … here it comes … the Fish! It was an inspired narrative!
The tale is usually told from the POV of the Narrator: First Person, Omniscient. The omniscient one is supposed to see all, know all, and most of the time, tell all. But sometimes they don’t tell us everything.
When we tell from a different character’s POV, we get just that, the character’s point of view. This can make the listener more sympathetic to that character (or not) as they reveal some of the inner thoughts and emotions they have. Normally, we detest the wife for being so increasingly greedy; and we are sympathetic to the fisherman for having to endure her constant dissatisfaction with her life.
But with the Fish telling the story, we can now connect to its feelings of “being in the middle” and the pressures it feels to play the role of wish granter. But we can now hear more about how the fish is feeling, and why it continues to come to the fisherman and grant the wishes. What is its motivation to keep coming back?
And as the teller, we can also “make” any character omniscient. The Fish can still have knowledge and understanding of the wife and “see” what happens to her each time she is upgraded, and then the resulting discontent.
One more thing: don’t assume any character is not a possible first person choice. We would rarely choose the Wife to tell the story as she seems to be the most despicable. But we might discover more about her just by doing it as an exercise. And if we make her omniscient, the ending can still work, as she sits in the once-again hovel of her house and thinks, “I know my husband is sitting in his boat and just smiling at that fish! They probably will talk all day and never even give a thought to poor, old me!”