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VICEnglishQuick questions
Unit 1: Reading and exploring texts and Crafting texts
Quick questions on Voice and perspective: VCE English Unit 1 Area of Study 1 and Area of Study 2
15short Q&A pairs drawn directly from our worked dot-point answer. For full context and worked exam questions, read the parent dot-point page.
What is the author's perspective?Show answer
The position from which the author wrote: their values, concerns, situation, and choices. The author is not in the text directly; the author is the maker of the text.
What is the narrator's perspective?Show answer
The position from which the text is told. The narrator can be first-person (a character in the world) or third-person (a voice outside the world). The narrator and the author are not the same.
What is the character's perspective?Show answer
The position of a character within the world of the text. Characters have perspectives that the narrator renders, agrees with, complicates, or contradicts.
What is first-person retrospective?Show answer
"I did this. I know now why." The narrator is a character in the world telling the story after it ended.
What is first-person present?Show answer
"I do this." The narrator is in the moment. The reader has the narrator's immediate perception with no benefit of hindsight.
What is third-person limited?Show answer
A third-person narrator who follows a single character's perception. The reader knows what the focalised character knows.
What is third-person omniscient?Show answer
A third-person narrator who has access to multiple characters' thoughts and to facts no character knows.
What is free indirect discourse?Show answer
A blending of narrator and character voice; the narrator renders a character's thought in third-person but with the character's language. "She was tired. The day had been long enough."
What is multiple voice?Show answer
Texts that alternate between voices (different first-person narrators, or first and third). The relation between voices is part of the meaning.
What is distinguish narrator from author?Show answer
If the narrator says something objectionable, that does not mean the author agrees. Ask what the text as a whole signals about the narrator's reliability.
What is notice when perspective shifts?Show answer
A scene rendered from one character's perspective and then from another's is doing structural work. The shift is the move.
What is read the gaps?Show answer
A third-person omniscient narrator who refuses to enter one character's perspective is making a choice. The refusal is interpretive material.
What is unreliable narrator?Show answer
A narrator whose account the reader has reason to doubt. Unreliability can be motivated (the narrator is concealing), unintentional (the narrator is mistaken), or stylistic (the narrator is naive). The text usually signals the unreliability.
What is limited narrator?Show answer
A narrator who is not unreliable but who simply does not know everything. The reader sees what the narrator sees and no more.
What is the gap between narrator and character?Show answer
A scene where the narrator's framing and a character's speech do not match is a scene worth attending to. The gap is the meaning.