In the case of omniscient narration, our vision is not limited at all. In the case of the so-called camera perspective, it is extremely limited: we only learn what a newcomer to the scene might observe and thus have no way of knowing what the characters feel or think. But this does not tell us how far our vision extends. Describing a point of view as "external," for example, suggests that we are viewing a character from the outside, from a spatial and possibly from an emotional and ideological distance. A further difficulty is that the terms may refer both to points from which the action is viewed and to regions that are viewed from these points. In the latter case, the "internal" perspective pulls us straight back into the "external" world. A character's consciousness can be directed inwards, as in meditation, but it can also be directed outwards, as in perception. However, the boundaries of a mind are less easily determined than those of a box. In narratology, these terms are not used with reference to well-defined spaces (inside or outside a box) but with reference to minds (inside or outside a character's consciousness). Edmiston 1991: 155) but ignored by many more. One source of confusion and controversy, which is related to the spatio-visual origin of the term, is the ambiguity of the attributes "external" and "internal," pointed out by a number of scholars (e.g. Perspective is a complex and controversial concept, as is attested by the proliferation of rival metaphors such as "reflector" (James 1972: 247), "focalization" (Genette 1980 Niederhoff → Focalization), "slant," "filter," and "interest- focus" (Chatman 1990), or "window" (Jahn 1996 Fludernik 1996). The point of view of a small child is indicated by the simple, repetitive syntax and by the periphrases "glass" for monocle and "hairy face" for beard. A narrator may tell the story from his own point of view, as in the following example: "A long time ago, little Stephen Dedalus, an inhabitant of Dublin, was eagerly listening to a story told to him by his father." But a narrator may also tell the story from the point of view of a character, as is shown by Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man the Joycean narrator adopts the perspective of little Stephen: "His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face" ( 1926: 7). Narratives have at least one narrator and usually more than one character and thus offer the possibility for a range of, and a change of, perspectives. The concept of perspective is especially pertinent to narrative. Most narratologists use perspective in the broader sense that includes visual data without being limited to them. Again, this impression need not be shared by other observers, as it might be an interpretation of the father's body language by a son who has a difficult relationship with his parent. Thus the verb "towered" suggests that the father is threatening the boy. The example also shows that the concept of perspective may be extended from vision in the literal sense to vision in the figurative sense, i.e. That the concept of perspective can also be applied to language is made evident by the following sentence, assumed to be spoken by a boy: "My father towered above me." The man in question need not be a giant the impression of his great height might simply result from the boy's viewpoint. In a painting of this sort, parallel lines converge as they recede from the viewer objects gain or lose in size depending on whether they are near or far and in the background, colors lose their intensity and acquire a bluish tinge. In the visual arts, perspective refers to a method that presents a scene as perceived from a "single fixed viewpoint" (Carter 1970: 840), creating the impression of three-dimensional depth on a two-dimensional surface. The more common term in Anglo-American criticism, which will be treated as equivalent here, is "point of view." Explication Perspective in narrative may be defined as the way the representation of the story is influenced by the position, personality and values of the narrator, the characters and, possibly, other, more hypothetical entities in the storyworld.
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