What is this POV?

[jaF0]

Besides really stupid and unworkable.

I've had something rattling around in my head for a while. Story is related as viewed by a party that doesn't really interact much with anyone. The person is in the room. Other people are there doing things. The person is there willingly, but is sort of being made to watch these things. Fairly elaborate, detailed things. They even talk to this person, but there are no replies. The person really has no in-story dialog. Either doesn't speak at all, only in brief one or two words, or muffled/unintelligible to the reader (think Charlie Brown's teacher). Maybe only as thoughts directed at the reader, retelling what happened.

I guess the person would be almost like an offscreen narrator in some ways.

 

[Kitty_so_frisky]

Could they have been drugged while the story unfolded and telling it in the past tense? Possibly not participating much because they were presumed unconscious in a hospital-style bed (whether actually in a hospital or receiving home care), or were unwillingly drugged, kidnapped and held hostage while his kidnappers work through their plentiful issues?

 

[jaF0]

No.

Fully willing.

 

[Kitty_so_frisky]

Groggy / dead tired and trying to take a nap?

 

[ElectricBlue]

If the person is observing and narrating, then it's first person pov.

It sounds like a curious premise though. Who is the observer, why are they there, why aren't they a participant in the action?

 

[ruddygore]

They are participating. They're the guest of honor at a bondage dinner party. Tied and gagged in a chair while everybody else is enjoying dinner.

 

[jaF0]

It sounds like a curious premise though. Who is the observer, why are they there, why aren't they a participant in the action?

Hard to explain, but one variation is one partner and the other partner's relatives or friends watching the partner performs with yet another. Who the partners are could vary ... couple, siblings, etc.

In the dream that brought this out (yes, really .. a dream), it's a husband in a room with the wife's parents while the wife is in another room. All three are watching on a large monitor screen. The parents have set it all up and are 'forcing' (but not really) him to watch ... 'this is the way our family works and now that you're a member ... '

Other variations follow as he/they watch other members of his family.

There is more, but ....

 

[KeithD]

You have to provide some of it to be able to assign a POV to it. It's most likely third.

 

[madelinemasoch]

In the dream that brought this out (yes, really .. a dream), it's a husband in a room with the wife's parents while the wife is in another room. All three are watching on a large monitor screen. The parents have set it all up and are 'forcing' (but not really) him to watch ... 'this is the way our family works and now that you're a member ... '

This reminds me of Get Out.

 

[SimonDoom]

There's no way to answer your question without your providing a sample of the story. It's all about how it's told.

 

[MillieDynamite]

The Virginian by Owen Wister, 1902. First-person narration, where the narrator is never given a name, never directly talks to anyone, and is somehow in every scene to see and record even the most intimate details.

Open lines.

Some notable sight was drawing the passengers, both men and women, to the window; and therefore I rose and crossed the car to see what it was. I saw near the track an enclosure, and round it some laughing men, and inside it some whirling dust, and amid the dust some horses, plunging, huddling, and dodging. They were cow ponies in a corral, and one of them would not be caught, no matter who threw the rope. We had plenty of time to watch this sport, for our train had stopped that the engine might take water at the tank before it pulled us up beside the station platform of Medicine Bow.

 

[SimonDoom]

The Virginian by Owen Wister, 1902. First-person narration, where the narrator is never given a name, never directly talks to anyone, and is somehow in every scene to see and record even the most intimate details.

Open lines.

Some notable sight was drawing the passengers, both men and women, to the window; and therefore I rose and crossed the car to see what it was. I saw near the track an enclosure, and round it some laughing men, and inside it some whirling dust, and amid the dust some horses, plunging, huddling, and dodging. They were cow ponies in a corral, and one of them would not be caught, no matter who threw the rope. We had plenty of time to watch this sport, for our train had stopped that the engine might take water at the tank before it pulled us up beside the station platform of Medicine Bow.

That novel never made any sense to me, because of the weird narrative perspective. I could not get past its narrative defects. How would the unnamed first person narrator know the things he did about the Virginian? Made no sense at all. It seemed lazy to me.

 

[TheRedChamber]

It's actually an interesting idea. I'm currently imagining one of my recent characters bound, gagged and tied and hung from the ceiling watching...something?...her husband making love with another woman, perhaps

If you are using 'I' in your story it's going to be first person. You could probably write it to avoid I but if you've got emotional responses to what the narrator is seeing then it's probably still first person. If the person watching is doing so objectively and dispassionately, that it will lean towards third person (though the language lawyers will be round in a moment to insist it's still first)

Ultimately it doesn't matter what grammatical label you put on it (as long as you don't give your readers a headache), if it works for you, go for it.

 

[12oclocktales]

That novel never made any sense to me, because of the weird narrative perspective. I could not get past its narrative defects. How would the unnamed first person narrator know the things he did about the Virginian? Made no sense at all. It seemed lazy to me.

You’d better smile when you say that!

The Virginian is a novel that insists that only through manliness and virility can the principles that govern people be reconciled (it’s why T.R. loved it so much). It would not be a popular choice for reviving in the world today, regardless of its narrative defects.

 

[Altissimus]

They are participating. They're the guest of honor at a bondage dinner party. Tied and gagged in a chair while everybody else is enjoying dinner.

You could use any narrative style - it's all about the how, not the what - but personally I think this shouts CTP, or first at a push.

I'm not sure there's a narrative style called 'omniscient first person bound and gagged', but then I never formally studied writing. Perhaps there is.

 

[StillStunned]

"Objective first person", I'd say. A more extreme version that Moby Dick or The Great Gatsby.

(I've been listening to "Writing Great Fiction: Storytelling Tips and Techniques" by James Hynes.)

 

[MillieDynamite]

That novel never made any sense to me, because of the weird narrative perspective. I could not get past its narrative defects. How would the unnamed first person narrator know the things he did about the Virginian? Made no sense at all. It seemed lazy to me.

It was actually a third person novel, cloaked in first person. There are intimate scenes with the Virginian and the schoolmarm. How could he know what happened from that front row seat? I think the third person narration of Clarence Mulford's Hopalong Cassidy series makes more since, as having been told to Mulford and her relays them to reader. Considering most of the locations are imagined by Mulford, real or made up, he did his research without benefit of every going west. And yet, the West Texas locations (somewhere east and north of the boots toe) are spot on.

The scenic descriptions aren't every overblown, but contain enough detail for you to really get a dry throat when you read about windswept, dry, and baren landscape.

 

[Carnevil9]

A lot of stories (especially long ago) kind of blur the distinction between first person and third person. "Gatsby" is told by Nick, who is barely involved in the story, so it is technically first person but feels more like third person. Same with Sherlock Holmes, which is narrated by Watson so it is technically first person. Poe and Lovecraft were both adherents of the "unnamed narrator" technique, in which you could never tell at first if the narrator was going to be part of the story, or was just telling the story long after the fact.

 

[LilyWaters]

Hard to explain, but one variation is one partner and the other partner's relatives or friends watching the partner performs with yet another. Who the partners are could vary ... couple, siblings, etc.

In the dream that brought this out (yes, really .. a dream), it's a husband in a room with the wife's parents while the wife is in another room. All three are watching on a large monitor screen. The parents have set it all up and are 'forcing' (but not really) him to watch ... 'this is the way our family works and now that you're a member ... '

Other variations follow as he/they watch other members of his family.

There is more, but ....

There's really no right answer here, but I just want to point out that the way I'm reading this situation you have posed above, it sounds like the observer IS the main participant. This has all been set up by the parents, and the narrative seems to revolve around his experience. It's voyeuristic, and it's HIS voyeurism - that seems to really be the central sex act here, even though it's the wife who's having the physical sex.

If it were me, I'd write this story in first person limited, because it's his reaction to what he's seeing that will spur the story along. Third person limited would also work, but I'd go for the immediacy of the "I". For what it's worth.

You could also use second person narration to put the reader in the voyeuristic perspective, but I'd keep the story short and tight, if that's the case. I find second person hard to sustain and can get a bit exhausting and gimmicky. But it is sometimes fun in erotica to have the reader thrust, as it were, into the story.

 

[SimonDoom]

A lot of stories (especially long ago) kind of blur the distinction between first person and third person. "Gatsby" is told by Nick, who is barely involved in the story, so it is technically first person but feels more like third person. Same with Sherlock Holmes, which is narrated by Watson so it is technically first person. Poe and Lovecraft were both adherents of the "unnamed narrator" technique, in which you could never tell at first if the narrator was going to be part of the story, or was just telling the story long after the fact.

A key difference is that in the case of Gatsby and Sherlock Holmes, the existence of a narrator separate from the "main" character creates a sense of mystery about the main character that could not be sustained in the same way if the story were told in the first person from that character's POV or in the third person POV. And Nick and Watson are very much active characters in their respective stories.

I find Lovecraft's narrative style weird and tedious. Having multiple layers of narrators, to me, just removes me from the action. It feels like something that authors back then Thought You Should Do, but it feels archaic to me. Poe does a little bit of this, but not as much, and when he does it he does it much more effectively.

Owen Wister's novel is weird because it starts as a first person narrative in which the unnamed narrator encounters, and describes, the Virginian, who is the hero, but then somehow with no particular explanation it shifts to a conventional third person narrative about the Virginian that relates events that nobody other than the Virginian (and at times his female companion) could know. No explanation is given how the narrator, who does not appear to be a close friend of the Virginian or to have any good reason to tell the tale, can possibly know what the Virginian is doing.

A more effective example of this style is Philip Roth's Zuckerman novels. Zuckerman is a fictional character, a writer who is a stand-in for Roth. In both the Human Stain and American Pastoral he narrates a story about another person that is partly in first person from Zuckerman's POV and partly third person about the main character. It seems a little contrived to me but I think you are supposed to understand the third person narrative as an imaginative reconstruction of the main person's life by Zuckerman the writer. Since he IS a writer there's some plausibility to the concept.