Point of View in a Text

Abstract

INCE ONLY SOMETHING which has an antithesis can act as a sign,' any compositional device becomes semantically distinctive once it is juxtaposed with a contrasting system. When a whole text is sustained in a single dimension, we are not aware of that dimension at all, as, for instance, in epic narrative. What Pushkin referred to as the rapid transitions of Romantic tales only acquire when combined with passages of leisurely narration. In the same way, of view is an element of structure which we become aware of as soon as there is a possibility of switching it in the course of the narrative (or of projecting the text onto another text with a different point of view) . 2 The concept of of view is analogous to that of perspective in painting and film. The concept of literary point of view unfolds as the relationship of the to its subject (or sentient center), where system may be on the linguistic level or on some higher level. By subject or sentient center of a (whether ideological or stylistic or whatever) we have in mind some consciousness which is capable of generating a structure of this kind, and, hence, is reconstructable through the process of reading. A is composed of a hierarchy of relationships. The very notion of having meaning presupposes a certain relationship, the presence of a defined sense of direction. But since the model at its most general re-creates an image of the world as seen by a particular consciousness, that is, provides a model for the relationship between a personality and the world (frequently, a perceiving personal-

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