Today I learned that the term “point of view” has largely gone out of use in literature studies, and been replaced by “perspective” and “voice”.

Why? Well, first of all because “point of view” is used in a lot of other ways, too, such as “one’s point of view on politics” and such like. More importantly, though, it’s been done because the terms “perspective” and “voice” allows us to separate between the character experiencing something and the narrator telling us about it, as these usually aren’t the same person.

For instance, if you have a novel like The Wizard Knight, which we’d once say was told from Sir Able’s point of view, today we’d say that both the perspective and the voice is Sir Able’s.

Pawn of Prophecy, on the other hand, is told through Garion’s perspective but with the voice of a somewhat distanced narrator, whose task is to convey Garion’s experiences to the reader.

Or something like that; I just learned this today, as I said, and I’m guessing it’s a lot more complicated than this, only they don’t tell us that yet. ;)