Point of View

It seems to me that in 20th Century so far the main characters of the novels we've focused on have been more controversial than I've noticed in any other english class I've taken so far, and even in books I've read outside of school. Perhaps I'm just reading books at a higher level than I used to, but I don't think so. It probably has something more to with the period of books we're reading from, that being from the modernist and post-modernist movements. I think that as a result of the "point" of the novel switching towards character study as Virginia Woolf puts it. As a result I think we get a number of characters who are harder to like than a usual narrator would be I believe. This is something to be celebrated though, since I don't think likable people are the only type of person worth studying. The interesting thing to me though is how my own perception of a character changes depending on how I'm viewing them.

The most relevant instance of this I think is the character who's point of view we're reading from right now--Rochester. By all counts I think if we were viewing him from any of the other characters in the novel would we see him as a straight up villain. As it stands I really don't like him for the most part, but that being said I have a hard time writing off everything he does. Obviously there's stuff that he does to Antoinette that we don't really get filled in by him, and as a result it's clear you lack a complete picture of who he is when he's the one describing events. That being said I still for some reason find ways that I can sympathize with him. For instance, I can see how he might feel really threatened by such an alien environment compared to his home of England. Not just the terrain, but the very type of people are very different to what he's accustomed to, and most aren't friendly. There even seems to be some merit to the claim that he was sort of forced into this marriage. All I'm saying here is that there is definitely material he talks about that gives him a more sympathetic air, which you wouldn't be privy to if you were being told his story from a different character's point of view. I think just as importantly however, there's definitely critical aspects of his personality that he chooses to leave out of the story.

Rochester isn't the only character who's been hard to sympathize with this semester though. In fact I believe that the very last character we observed was at times a hard character to sympathize with, let alone understand. Really, I think it's kind of hard to sympathize with someone who shoots and kills another person for no obvious reason. The jury at his hearing decidedly were not such people. Yet, there were still several people in my class at least who at times felt very sympathetic towards Meursault. He let's us in on feelings and insights about his situation that we could never have been experienced to otherwise, and the result is that we start to even care about him.

I don't mean to overplay the extent to which I think we do, or should, sympathize with the character whose point of view we are reading from. There's obviously loads of reasons to dislike a character like Rochester even when we're getting his side of the story. I suppose if I had to summarize my thoughts on the subject in a thesis statement though, it would be this: I see point of view as a very valuable tool for authors to demonstrate the complexities and dynamics of human character and how variable it can be, and this is especially pertinent to a movement whose goal is to study the character in depth.