SYMBOL. POINT OF VIEW

SYMBOL

Simply put, a symbol is something which means something else. Frequently it’s a tangible physical thing which symbolizes something intangible.

The basic point of a story or a poem rarely depends solely on understanding a symbol. However important or interesting they might be, symbols are usually “frosting,” things which add interest or depth.

It’s normal for you to be skeptical about symbols. If I tell you that the tree in a certain story symbolizes the Garden of Eden, you may ask “Is that really there or did you make it up?” or “How do you know what the author meant?”

Literature teachers may indeed “over-interpret” at times, find symbols that really aren’t there. But if you don’t occasionally chase white rabbits that aren’t there, you’ll rarely find the ones that are there.

In the film 2001, a computer named HAL is controlling a flight to Jupiter. When the human crew decides to abort the mission, HAL—programmed to guarantee the success of the mission—“logically” begins to kill off the humans. Science fiction’s oldest theme: man develops a technology which he not only cannot control, it controls him.

Consider HAL’s name. Add one letter to each of the letters in his name. Change the H to I, the A to B, and the L to M. When you realize how close HAL is to IBM, the first response is disbelief. But clearly the closeness of the names is either an absolute accident or an intentional choice. As much as we are startled by the latter, we probably agree that the odds against the former—it being an accident—are astronomical.

Somebody thought that up. Or maybe a computer.

POINT OF VIEW

Point of View is the “narrative point of view,” how the story is told—more specifically, who tells it.

There are two distinctly different types of point of view and each of those two types has two variations.

In the First Person point of view, the story is told by a character within the story, a character using the first person pronoun, I.

If the narrator is the main character, the point of view is first person protagonist. Mark Twain lets Huck Finn narrate his own story in this point of view.

If the narrator is a secondary character, the point of view is first person observer. Arthur Conan Doyle lets Sherlock Holmes’ friend Dr. Watson tell the Sherlock Holmes story. Doyle frequently gets credit for telling detective stories this way, but Edgar Allan Poe perfected the technique half a century earlier.

In the Third Person point of view,the story is nottold by a character but by an “invisible author,” using the third person pronoun (he, she, or it) to tell the story. Instead of Huck Finn speaking directly to us, “My name’s Huckleberry Finn” and telling us “I killed a pig and spread the blood around so people would think I’d been killed”, the third person narrator would say: “He killed a pig and spread the blood…..”

If the third person narrator gives us the thoughts of characters (He wondered where he’d lost his baseball glove), then he is a third person omniscient(all knowing) narrator.

If the third person narrator only gives us information which could be recorded by a camera and microphone (no thoughts), then he is a third person dramatic narrator.

In summary, then, here are the types of point of view:

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