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.

As far as playing with point of view, and not in blogs but in the pages of The New York Times and Rolling Stone, two of my favorite political journalists combine novel points of view with strong attitude and voice. They would be Mark Leibovich and Matt Taibbi.

Check out this story from November 2006 (one of my all-time favorites) by Leibovich. It’s written in the classic reportorial third person, but an awful lot of Leibovich seeps in. My favorite paragraph, describing President Bush after the “thumpin’” Republicans took in the primaries: “He looked worn at his must-see midday news conference, in need of a haircut, good-night’s sleep, better makeup job, hug, vacation in Crawford or some combination thereof. The grooves across his forehead were dark and articulated, his voice slightly hoarse. He wore a maroon tie, the color of blood.”

Then look at a 2007 profile of Mike Huckabee by Taibbi. He starts in the slangy second person (“you”), then writes the rest of the piece in the first.

I’ve been thinking about point of view. After all, what defines a blog if not point of view? A blog brings you one person’s prejudices, insights, and endless opinions. (Of course, the best blogs bring you much more—like new information, credible reporting, and, sometimes, bursts of brilliant writing.)

But a blog often comes alive because of another aspect of point of view, the literary aspect. The writer sets this point of view by his or her choice of pronouns—I, we, you, he, one, they. I’ve pondered what point of view to use here: The soul-bearing I? The inclusive we, which can also verge into the elegant “editorial we” or the arrogant “royal we”? Or the informal you, capable of sliding from authoritative, even bossy, to irreverent and hip?

Joan Didion once wrote about the act of choosing the first person singular point of view: “In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act… There’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writers sensibility on the readers most private space.”

As you see, I’m going for I, not because I’m a secret bully, but because I want you, my reader, to know that this is really coming from me. This point of view will, I hope, let me gush about writing, even as the articles on the site may have the much more reasoned third-person perspective of the journalist and critic.

I’ll post more about this soon, but in the meantime, talk to me about point of view. Have you seen blogs that dare to diverge from the first person? Are there journalists who go for something more revealing than the detached third person? Can you think of a nonfiction writer who uses you like the novelist Jay McInerney?

Who out there is playing with point of view?