The Incarnation: When God Changed His Point of View, and Other Notes on Narrative Distance

Thirteen years ago, I watched a divine moment of literary brilliance: Harold Crick brushed his teeth up and down and back and forth, counting strokes as he did so, and began hearing the distinct voice of a female, British narrator detailing his thoughts and actions. He thought he had gone crazy; his literature professor wanted to know, comedy or tragedy?

We all know that narrators have a nasty habit of dipping themselves right into a person’s brain matter and pushing around all that spongey stuff for their own benefit. But a transcendent, third-person narrator who makes her presence inside a character heard? And a character who interacts with his author on the pages of his own book? Absurd.

Except that this same plot line was in one of the first stories ever. It was outlined and approved by a committee of three and launched into production in eternity past. In that story, the transcendent author wanted to be found. He was, in fact, the one who came looking for characters that had gotten lost at the turn from chapter two to chapter three. Many have thought this author’s premise farcical too. But really, it was just a matter of extreme narrative distance, the most immanence possible, an author who went beyond seeing into everyone to become an author everyone could see.

Every narrative author makes point-of-view choices that determine the possibilities for each story. If character, setting, and plot are the oil pigments for a painting, then point of view and narrative distance are the brush strokes by which the author fashions them on the canvas. Point of view is not just the lens through which we see a story, it’s how we see anything of a story at all.

But true point of view may not be what you learned in school. It’s not so simple as segregating books into first person, third omniscient, and third person limited as though tossing novels into baskets. Each story requires the author’s second self, the narrator, to vary the distance between herself and the characters, and between herself and the readers, at just the right time. As with the Incarnation, and as with the story of Harold Crick, it’s this shift in point of view that transforms our understanding and promises to change us forever.

Understand What Drives Point of View

You may remember Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) and his British narrator Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson) in the Zach Helm’s screenplay Stranger Than Fiction, released in 2006. The film plays with issues of self-determination and fate, and comments on what constitutes a well-lived life, but most poignantly, it allows author and character to meet face to face and consider what such a connection might mean. The main character, coming to know everything the author knows about his story and how it will end, realizes his greater purpose; the author, thrust into experiencing the story side by side with her creation, finds new meaning in death and sacrifice.

Stranger Than Fiction isn’t the biblical redemption story, though it has some fun parallels (and who wouldn’t want Dustin Hoffman playing the role of wise man?). But it reminds us to ask how point of view works and why an author’s command of narrative distance makes or breaks a story.

The majority of writing books I’ve read concern themselves with discussion of person (first; second; third omniscient, limited, or dramatic) when it comes to point of view rather than narrative distance. Yet as several literary critics like David Jauss, Wayne C. Booth, and Meir Sternberg[1] have noted, narrative distance makes far more difference than the pronominal perspective.

So just what is narrative distance?

Narrative distance is the extent to which the author’s narrator stays outside the characters’ minds and souls. Author and writing professor David Jauss calls this “from long shots to X-rays” in an essay by the same name.[2] He concludes that “point of view is more a matter of where the language is coming from than it is of person. The points of view that keep us outside a character require the narrator to use his language, not his character’s, whereas the points of view that allow us to be inside a character require the narrator to use the character’s language, at least some of the time.”[3]

The most distant point of view is the dramatic, where the narrator stays outside every character. The narrator presents minimal action and scene—essentially, the external stage directions—and dialogue. Ernest Hemingway uses the dramatic point of view almost exclusively in his short story “Hills Like White Elephants”—I say almost because as Jauss points out, Hemingway breaks his chosen point of view at the end of the story to great effect. (More on that in a moment.)

Most writers will have heard that breaking point of view is the death of a story, and for certain, mastering point-of-view constraints is essential to good storytelling. Unintended person shifts (e.g., first to third), unskilled wavering between depths (knowing/seeing something in a deep, limited third that the point-of-view character couldn’t know), and uncontrolled head-hopping read as shaky and disorienting as looking through binoculars while driving over a potholed road. Readers easily get lost and fall out of the story world.

Writers must learn to handle the tremendous horsepower of point of view: how to feather into first gear, slide and stay in third dramatic, or settle into a deep, third limited for the long haul, even when the engine roars and the terrain tempts you to shift.

But if we look at the work of most of our master storytellers, we see that they know how to maximize the whole transmission: “however singular and consistent the person of a story may be, the techniques that truly constitute point of view are inevitably multiple and shifting.”[4] Each chosen narrator (whether third person or first person) remains outside the characters, relating externals, or zooms in for a closer view as needed, to further the literary argument and story goal. The author shifts point of view deftly as a seasoned story driver, so that the reader feels only the smooth journey and not the disconcerting back and forth of a gear change.

Dramatic Third

In “Hills Like White Elephants,” for instance, Jauss notes that Hemingway starts and nearly stays exclusively in the dramatic point of view. The opening paragraph sets the scene in objective language, introducing us to the small train station in Spain and “The American and the girl with him.”[5] As Jauss states, “the narrator assumes maximum distance from the characters he describes and writes about them in language appropriate to him but not necessarily to them. We are so distant from Hemingway’s characters, for example, that we don’t even know their names.”[6]

As readers, we watch the couple have a conversation and drink beer, and we intuitively know that they have tension in their relationship. He desires that she have an abortion; she is reluctant. We know all this even though the closest the text comes to saying these words is “an awfully simple operation.”[7]

We must have some understanding of character motivation or we don’t have story; the difference between point of views is how we come to know it. Even when a narrator assumes objective maximum distance in the narration, the omniscient author continues to imply thoughts and feelings through subtext, writing “objective, sensory detail or action that correlates to a character’s subjective thoughts and feelings.”[8]

We infer that when the girl continually looks “across at the hills on the dry side of the valley” and the man looks “at her and at the table,”[9] she is thinking beyond the here and now while he is not. He presses the issue; she says, “Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?”[10] We realize that she is more than done with this discussion.

At this point, we see the man quiet, finally contemplating their relationship and where it is headed: “He did not say anything but looked at the bags against the wall of the station. There were labels on them from all the hotels where they had spent nights.”[11] He gets up from their table, moves their luggage to prepare for the train that is about to come and irretrievably move them on from this way station.

With the man’s next action, he and Hemingway’s narrator both cross a threshold. The man looks up the tracks “but could not see the train.”[12] Knowing what the man could not see dips us into his mind and breaks the objective dramatic point of view (which would show only what his eyes are physically pointed toward). He then goes inside the bar. He looks at the people waiting in the bar. And then Hemingway gives us the one-word interior intrusion that finally defines the character and the story: reasonably. “They were all waiting reasonably for the train.”[13]

That word reveals his opinion of the woman as well as his opinion of himself. He is reasonable; she is not. He is not trying villainously manipulate her; he believes he is acting the more reasonably of the two with the given situation. Externally at least, in dialogue, he has offered for the woman not to have the abortion if it means so much to her. But Hemingway masterfully lets the readers see, with these tiny breaks in narrative distance, that the couple will not move on together. The man cannot see the train. He thinks her unreasonable. And Hemingway has identified us the reader, ever so subtly, with the argument side of the man. We can make our own decisions as to his rightness, but first we must experience his point of view.

Omniscient First and Indirect Interior Monologue

 Critics like Jauss and Wayne C. Booth look more closely at the relationships of the author, implied author, and narrator to the characters and even the reader than the pronouns used. Changes in narrative distance occur in every common point of view person. First person narrators can speak dramatically and objectively. They can also relate omnisciently what other characters think, though they usually do so in their own language rather than the character’s. Fitzgerald’s Nick Carroway does this in The Great Gatsby when he recalls for the reader the story Jay Gatsby told him of his love affair with Daisy before she married Tom Buchanan:

It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy—it increased her value in his eyes. He felt their presence all about the house, pervading the air with the shades and echoes of still vibrant emotions.

But he knew that he was in Daisy’s house by a colossal accident. … So he made the most of his time. He took what he could get, ravenously and unscrupulously—eventually he took Daisy one still October night, took her because he had no real right to touch her hand.

… She vanished into her rich house, into her rich, full life, leaving Gatsby—nothing. He felt married to her, that was all.

When they met again, two days later, it was Gatsby who was breathless, who was, somehow, betrayed. …

… and Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes, and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor.[14]

Such language, though perhaps based on the story Gatsby related is not Gatsby’s, it’s Nick’s. In the next paragraph we get a sense of what Gatsby’s telling of the story was actually like:

I can’t describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved her, old sport. I even hoped for a while that she’d throw me over, but she didn’t, because she was in love with me too. She thought I knew a lot because I knew different things from her . . . Well, there I was, ’way off my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute, and all of a sudden I didn’t care.[15]

Gatsby is barely self-aware of his own emotions, let alone able to relate them in the rich language and detail of Nick. Nick tells the story with an omniscient sense of Gatsby’s thoughts, in indirect interior monologue, where the narrator steps into another mind yet reflects in his own language, pronouns, and verb tense what he finds there. (Indirect interior monologue is also what Hemingway’s narrator does when he says the word reasonably.)

Many modern novels use a deep third-person narrator told primarily in indirect interior monologue. This zooming in to one character’s viewpoint comes closer to the personal connection and immediacy of first-person narration while retaining more sense of objectivity and an ability to switch to another character in an intervening scene or chapter without confusing the reader.

Direct Interior Monologue and Stream of Consciousness

Other point of view techniques dive deeper and closer into the character’s mind. Direct interior monologue allows a character to take over as a co-narrator, even if just for a short moment, though not consciously as with a true first-person narrator. Direct interior monologue uses the character’s language, pronouns, and verb tense at the time of the thoughts. So if Nick, telling Gatsby’s story had dived that deep into Gatsby’s mind, he might have interrupted his indirect reflecting of Gatsby’s thoughts with a direct telling such as the following:

What? She’s been with those men too? What sport! She’s thrown them over, but I’ll out win them all.

 Stream of consciousness goes even further to narrate process of thought without arranging or editing, and if told in third person, represents the most omniscient dive into even the unconscious thoughts of a character. While this extreme level of omniscience is important to the biblical narrative, as it most closely represents the definition of omniscience found there, the biblical narrators do not employ this technique. We find both direct interior monologue and stream of consciousness narrative techniques primarily in modern literature. Therefore, as I wish now to turn to biblical narrative, we will have to delve deeper into this technique another day.

Transcendent Knowledge: Zooming into the Mind of God

What happens when we apply this understanding of the techniques of point of view and narrative distance to the biblical narrative? What do we discover as the Bible transitions from “God created the heavens and the earth” to “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” that very stranger-than-fiction moment when God “was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him” (Gen 1;1; John 1:14, 10)?

First, please observe a few consequential points:

1. Omniscience occurs in fiction because the author creates and directs the world. Writers may speak of characters talking back at them and forcing the plot to go a certain direction, but character self-determination occurs merely because first the author created a determined, motivated character and must stay true to the constraints of her creation.

2. Whether the narrator is fully, partially, or not at all omniscient in the story (here meaning only able to see into hearts and minds), the author, by nature, is fully omniscient.

3. An author limits the expression of omniscience in every narration to some degree. No story tells all the thoughts of every character.

4. Authors use narrative distance, including expression or suppression of omniscience to manipulate the reader response and maximize the impact of experiential rather than narrated knowledge.

Thus, though Karen Eiffel’s voice narrates Harold Crick’s story and she is also seemingly the author of the story we are watching on film, we discover that she can’t be. Because [spoiler alert] when Harold calls her number as she types, “The phone rang,” she does not know that Harold is a real person in her world. She does not know that he will show up at her apartment or that her assistant will give him the manuscript to read. If Karen doesn’t know these events, she cannot be the omniscient author. Another author and another narrator, then, a level above, are telling this story, visually dropping into her head as she struggles with suicidal thoughts and writer’s block while she drops audibly into Harold’s thoughts narrating his humdrum, tragic life.

The Bible also has these authorial layers. Human writers “spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Pet 1:21). The human authors were not omniscient of historical, nonfiction events and people, but the narrators are because God is. And God, through these narrators, through their language, pivots between dramatic objective storytelling to omniscient indirect interior monologue to direct reader response toward experiential knowledge.

Thus our omniscient narrator writes objectively of the beginning of the creation of the world, formless and dark and void. The Spirit of God was there, and God spoke, and light appeared. Then he dips into and reflects the divine mind in his own language, “And God saw that the light was good” (Gen 1:4). From the beginning then, the narrator directs us to know the author as a point-of-view character. But he is a character we are distanced from by time and space and being. And his transcendent knowledge is something we want even more than life itself.

In the remainder of the Hebrew Scriptures, we hear God’s words, we see him act, and receive the narrator’s omniscient commentary on events when it serves his purpose, but we only rarely dip back into indirect interior monologue, to the moments when we hear God’s thoughts, to when we’re privy to such things as what he regrets (Gen 6:6; 1 Sam 15:35).

Flash forward to the Gospels. The Author enters the story world in time and place and being. And there the narrator masterfully drives his point of view. Dropping omnisciently into the varied hearts of humanity, the narrator steers the reader to identify with the human experience of God in our midst while primarily showing us Jesus as we would experience him firsthand: dramatically. We see what he does. We see what he says. And we are to make inference from those externals what he thinks and feels.

But every so often, the Gospel narrators drop right into his mind and heart and shift our point of view: “And Jesus, looking at him, loved him” (Mark 10:21); “When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his spirt and greatly troubled” (John 11:33).

Even more rarely, but there, the narrators go further. More than telling us briefly what Jesus feels or knows, they switch to narrating a scene where we look directly through his eyes and heart:

Jesus looked up and saw the rich putting their gifts into the offering box, and he saw a poor widow put in two small copper coins. (Luke 21:1)

And when evening came, the boat was out on the sea, and he was alone on the land. And he saw that they were making headway painfully, for the wind was against them. And about the fourth watch of the night he came to them, walking on the sea. He meant to pass by them… (Mark 6:47–48)

Amazingly, we discover from Matthew that the boat out on the sea is a long way from shore. They have been sailing the entire night, for now it is between 3 and 6 a.m. It is dark, perhaps with only moon and starlight, and yet Jesus can see their struggle—and us with him. And so he walks out to them, and we learn he has more to share with them than just getting in the boat. Because he means to pass them by—but he doesn’t.

The narrators have zoomed in for these moments, to let us walk in God’s sandals, to experience the way he loves, but none more so than John’s scene of the Upper Room. I have always understood John’s mention of himself in his Gospel as the “disciple that Jesus loved” as a humble refusal to name himself other than how God sees him. But consider what happens to that phrase when we see John 13 as one of the Bible’s most intimate scenes told primarily as Jesus indirect interior monologue:

Now before the Feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. During supper, when the devil had already put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon’s son, to betray him, Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going back to God, rose from supper. . . . He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Lord, do you wash my feet?” . . . For he knew who was to betray him; that was why he said, “Not all of you are clean.”

When he had washed their feet and put on his outer garments and resumed his place, he said to them, …

After saying these things, Jesus was troubled in his spirit, and testified, “Truly, truly, I say to you, one of you will betray me.”… One of his disciples, whom Jesus loved, was reclining at table at Jesus’ side…So that disciple, leaning back against Jesus, said to him, “Lord, who is it?” … So when he had dipped the morsel, he gave it to Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot. Then after he had taken the morsel, Satan entered into him. Jesus said to him, “What you are going to do, do quickly.” (John 13:1–27)

Jesus’s narrated thoughts themselves confirm his love for John. I can only imagine writing this Gospel and this scene and being overwhelmed as omniscient knowledge of God’s love for me filled the page.

The Upper Room Discourse that follows this extended scene from Jesus’s intimate point of view includes some of the most beloved passages of the Bible, and I think rightly so. These chapters start with us already deep in the mind of God. I believe they stay there as Jesus begins to talk. In all of chapters 14 and 15, we hear the disciple’s questions but not their thoughts, just as Jesus would experience them dramatically. It’s not until John 16:19 that we dip into interior monologue—and that monologue is not from the disciples’ heads but the Lord’s: “Jesus knew that they wanted to ask him, so he said to them…” And in chapter 17, though Jesus has sometimes prayed out loud so that the disciples can hear, most often we see him praying in seclusion. Here, Jesus lets us in to his most intimate requests on our behalf. He shifts the playing field. For eons omniscience has been about him knowing us; now he uses it for us to know him.

A Final Note

Every narrative author makes point-of-view choices that determine the possibilities of each story. In Stranger Than Fiction, Karen Eiffel’s author gave us a glimpse into her perspective so we could see that the great tragedian’s obsession with death was perhaps a cry for help, a search for a reason to live. She needed a character like Harold Crick, who, learning he would die, would come alive. And in so doing, helped Karen discover that perhaps death isn’t so inevitable after all.

The biblical author has a point to his view as well. He doesn’t just say he wants to dwell with us, he does it. He doesn’t want us to merely give assent to who he is, he wants us to experience who he is. Jesus, God divine, takes on flesh to experience eternity with his creation. The Spirit, Holy and omnipresent, makes himself known in the brain matter and souls of those who invite him in. This narrator who reads our hearts and minds and interprets them wants his presence there known and heard. So we can live life to the fullest. And be changed forever.

[1] Even though I have cited only Jauss in this article, I am indebted to the contributions of all three literary critics on this topic.

[2] David Jauss, On Writing Fiction: Rethinking Conventional Wisdom about the Craft. (Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest Books, 2011), 37.

[3] David Jauss, On Writing Fiction: Rethinking Conventional Wisdom about the Craft. (Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest Books, 2011), 37.

[4] Jauss, 35.

[5] Hemingway, Ernest. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. Kindle ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster), p. 211.

[6] Jauss, On Writing Fiction: Rethinking Conventional Wisdom about the Craft., 38.

[7] Hemingway, 212.

[8] Jauss, On Writing Fiction: Rethinking Conventional Wisdom about the Craft., 40.

[9] Hemingway, 214.

[10] Hemingway, 214.

[11] Hemingway, 214.

[12] Hemingway, 214.

[13] Hemingway, 214. I am dependent on David Jauss for pointing out the significance of this particular word.

[14] F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 1st Scribner classic/Collier ed, A Scribner Classic (New York: Collier Books, 1986), 149–50.

[15] Fitzgerald, 150.