Visual Note · point of view · narration · focalization
Who Speaks? Who Sees?
The distinction between narrator and focalizer can clarify many point-of-view problems.
A narrator and a focalizer are not necessarily the same thing.
The narrator answers one question:
Who speaks?
The focalizer answers another:
Who perceives?
This distinction becomes useful when a passage feels inconsistent even though its grammatical point of view has not changed.
A story can remain in third person while its focalization moves from one consciousness to another.
That shift—not the pronoun—is often the source of the reader’s sense that the point of view has changed.