The perspective from which a speaker or writer tells a story or presents information. Conventionally, writers of nonfiction rely on either the first-person (I) point of view or the third-person (he, she, it, they)--or some combination of the two. See also:
Observations:
"It's hard to write a memoir or a personal essay without falling back on the 'I.' In fact, all nonfiction is really told in the technical first-person point of view: there is always a narrator doing the telling, and the narrator is not some fictional persona but the author.
"This single point of view is one of the important--and frustrating--hallmarks that distinguishes nonfiction from fiction.
"Yet there are ways to mimic other points of view--and thereby to tell a more natural sort of story.
"Listen to the opening lines of Daniel Bergner's God of the Rodeo: 'When he had finished work--building fence or penning cattle or castrating bull calves with a knife supplied by his boss on the prison farm--Johnny Brooks lingered in the saddle shed. The small cinder-block building is near the heart of Angola, Louisiana's maximum-security state penitentiary. Alone there, Brooks placed his saddle on the wooden rack in the middle of the room, leapt onto it, and imagined himself riding in the inmate rodeo coming up in October.'
"No sign yet of the author--a strictly third-person presentation. . . . The author won't enter the story directly for many more lines; he'll duck in once to let us know he's there and then disappear for long stretches . . ..
"But in fact, of course, the author has been with us in every line, in the second way that an author participates in a nonfiction story: tone."
(Carolyn Forché and Philip Gerard, Writing Creative Nonfiction, Writer's Digest Books, 2001)
