Who sees and who speaks: why is "point of view" not enough?
"Point of view" mixes up who sees and who speaks, so a French critic split it in two.
▶ Start the storyBecause "point of view" squeezes two different questions into one. Who is speaking? And whose eyes are we looking through? The French theorist Gérard Genette introduced the term focalisation to replace the vaguer notion of point of view, by separating who sees (the focaliser) from who speaks (the narrator).
Once you separate them, you can name three settings. In zero focalisation the narrator knows more than any character and can move freely between their minds, the old omniscient narrator. In internal focalisation the story is restricted to what a single character perceives, knows or thinks. In external focalisation the narrator reports only what can be observed, such as actions and speech, with no access to anyone's thoughts. Genette compared that last one to a camera eye, as in Dashiell Hammett's novels and many of Ernest Hemingway's short stories.
Step 1: Zero
The narrator knows more than any character and moves freely between their minds
Step 2: Internal
Restricted to what a single character perceives, knows or thinks
Step 3: External
Only observable actions and speech, like a camera eye
The settings can move. Internal focalisation may be fixed on one character throughout, as in Henry James's The Ambassadors, or shift between characters, as in Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Genette himself noted that these types rarely appear in pure form throughout a whole work.
And Genette's tools had a bigger ambition. Earlier narratology had been criticised for dealing only with simple stories, such as Propp's folktales. Genette drew his examples mainly from Proust's In Search of Lost Time: if narratology could cope with Proust, that criticism could no longer be made.
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Recap
The voice that speaks and the eye that sees can be different, and zero, internal and external focalisation describe how much the eye knows.
💡 A trick to remember it · A narrator is the mouth, the focaliser is the eye: zero sees all, internal sees through one head, external sees only the surface.
Surprising fact · Genette compared external focalisation to a camera eye, as in Hemingway's short story "The Killers".
Sources (2)
No source, no claim. Every fact in this lesson (17 claims) cites at least one of these.