זוויות שונות, טקסטים שונים

Three things change with the perspective

• Different character, narrator or speaker perspectives often reveal different information, develop different attitudes, and influence different interpretations of a text and the ideas in it.
• Three effects, and they are not the same claim.
• Information is what you get; attitude is how it is coloured; interpretation is what the whole text then means.

Two narrators describe the same dinner: one reviews the soup, the other asks where the host went.

Different information

• Two characters in the same room have access to different facts.
• In a long novel this is structural: whole subplots exist only in one character's knowledge.
• So ask, at any point, who knows what — and what the reader knows because of whose perspective they are in.

Different attitudes

• The same fact carries a different attitude depending on who reports it.
• A marriage described by the bride, the mother and the creditor is three different marriages.
• None of them is lying; each perspective develops its own attitude toward the same event.

Different interpretations of the ideas

• The CED's third effect is the largest: perspectives influence different interpretations of a text and the ideas in it.
• So a novel that gives you two perspectives on duty is offering two readings of duty itself.
• The book need not choose, and the strongest essays notice when it does not.

A perspectives pass

• Pick one event. Write what each perspective knows about it.
• Write the attitude each takes toward it.
• Then name the idea the event touches, and how each perspective reads that idea.