Point of View

A diverse Point of View in literature is what produces the story. In each story the author shows you what they think is important by giving you a certain point of view. Whether it is a first person or a third person point of view, there is always a motive behind why the author chose that view.

“Everything that Rises Must Converge”, by Flannery O’Conner, deals with contentious issues of racism and the questionable validity of what is racism after the civil rights movement. In the portrayal of these sensitive issues, O’Conner utilizes a unique narrative point of view in order to maneuver the reader’s response to characters, situations, conflicts and issues. Through these different levels of narration, from the third person narration of Julian’s point of view, and the limited periods of other first person narrations from the minor characters, readers are influenced and manipulated to question their own attitudes towards the racial issues presented. O’Conner uses third person limited by explaining the describing the events that were occurring on the bus: “Julian rose, crossed the aisle, and say down in the place of the women with the canvas sandals”…..”Do you have a light?” he asked the Negro.(pg914) O’Conner allows us to see the tension between Julian and his mother, which gives readers an insight into her character’s inner thoughts and motivations. As viewing the anger in Julian’s mother and his despiteful ways of producing it, links the two emotions that develop through the story. O’Conner does this for the reader to generate their own picture. Point of view in this passage was used in a unique way which allowed the readers to open up and grasp who was portraying the racism in the story. It puzzled the reader by making them query who actually the racist character in this passage was.

The third person limited point of view is also present in “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, also written by O’Conner. The main character, the grandmother, is limited because the other characters were represented in the story as well. What is interesting about this story and the characters, is that every character has a name besides the daughter in-law. This is where the reader can use their imagination and develop reasoning for why the grandmother refers to her daughter in-law as the “children’s mother”: “Bailey and the children’s mother sat in the front and they left Atlanta….”.(pg898) I interpret that the grandmother referred her as the “children mother” because she felt as if the her son was being taking from her. Once again the third person point of view allows the reader to interpret information in different ways; it is a unique way of writing and allows the reader to think about the