The term narrative point of view provides a way to identify the storyteller and to think about how the story unfolds. For readers it is, as the term suggests, a perspective, a focal point. Understanding point of view helps readers understand the story's language and tone. Along with the traditional classifications of first and third person, narrative point of view includes:

• The amount of time lapsed between event and telling: as events occur or more likely after they occur.
• The mental processes of the narrator: an attitude that underlies the telling, e.g. feminist, Marxist, existential.
• The narrator's character and behavior, for example, a narrator may be revealing a changed attitude through reflection or maturity as in a story of childhood told by an adult looking back or story of loss of innocence told by the mature person.

  - adapted in part from The Harper Handbook to Literature, 1985, Northrup Frye, Sheridan Baker, George Perkins

First person is recognizable by use of first person pronoun, generally "I" but sometimes "we" and

• offers a singularity of perspective
• asks reader to take into account the character of the storyteller (for example, the naivety of Huck Finn, the deceitfulness of Montresor), and a dishonest storyteller is called an unreliable narrator
• may be a participant, a character involved in the events, or a nonparticipant, an observer-character not actually involved and therefore closely resemble third person

Third Person is an outside force without any clear identity that tells the story [described elsewhere as a central consciousness or as like the eye of God].

• Omniscient: narrator moves freely about in time and space and into characters’ thoughts and feelings
• Limited omniscient: although narrator is able to move freely, the narration focuses on the movements and particularly attitudes of a single character as if readers were seeing through that character's perspective but with the filter of the outside narrator
• Objective: narrator refrains from any editorial commentary, creating a more detached perspective (may be omniscient or limited)
• Dramatic: Not omniscient at all—more like the eye of a fixed camera, able to reveal external movements and words only and therefore objective (except for selectivity of details to include)