If you think I’m obsessed with point of view, you’re right! I am auditing a Harvard class taught by James Wood (also a critic for The New Yorker), who has been discussing point of view in novels by Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov. And in the first lecture of the class, Postwar American and British Fiction, Woods suggested that we might “want to pick up some Flaubert” and look specifically at point of view. OK, so I devoured all 275 pages of Madame Bovary.

Flaubert pioneered—or at least put on the map—the “free indirect style,” in which an omniscient narrator suddenly evaporates, entering into a character’s consciousness and representing his or her thoughts. (Check out the market scene with Emma and her lover-to-be.)

Of course, in nonfiction, free indirect style works less well. I call a writer who engages in such shape-shifting a “Wobbly Narrator.” Most writers who jump around from “he” to “you” to “I” are novices who haven’t mastered point of view, or who are afraid to pick a stance toward the material—whether the first-person singular of memoir, the second-person singular of colloquial writers reaching out to readers, or the third-person singular of the reporter concerned with credibly and precisely observing others.

Lemme find some examples of The Wobbly Narrator. I’ll post them in comments—and invite you to do the same.