SansPoint

House of Leaves and Some Thoughts About Multiple Points-of-View

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I recently got ahold of House of Leaves (part of my reading list for 2008), and have been almost unable to put the damn thing down since I got it. Even without the strange formatting and typography, it would be a captivating read, though the strange formatting certainly adds to the experience, particularly during Expedition #4.

Reading it has me thinking about about multiple narrators and multiple points-of-view. It’s a technique that I’ve been using in my fiction for a while, and something I want to develop. The novel-in-progress I am working on currently switches between a limited first-person perspective with third-person limited perspectives[1] and the occasional first-person flashback[2] Multiple narrators and multiple POVs help to expose a reader to alternate sides of a story, providing perspective and exploring situations that affect the main plotline, but are not directly involved by the main character.

What, perhaps, I like best about multiple narrators is the idea of the unreliable narrator, and how an event or situation depicted from multiple perspectives can vary, leaving the true story somewhere in between.[3] The three main intertwined House of Leaves narratives: that of The Navidson Record itself, Zampanó’s critical essay on The Navidson Record, and Truant’s exploration of Zampanó’s writing and its effect upon his own life all function to provide a different perspective on each individual narrative. They form a cubist structure, augmented by the physical structure of the text, reflecting back upon each other[4]

I’d love more examples of novels with well done multiple narrators and points-of-view. If you want to make recommendations, leave a comment.


  1. i.e. a third-person narrator that only can focus on one character at a time, and explore only that person’s thoughts. ↩
  2. My first-person flashbacks are, curiously, in present tense to contrast them with the past tense writing in the main first-person narrative. ↩
  3. The canonical example of this is the Japanese short story Rashomon, in which multiple narrators tell their side of a murder story. Natsuo Kirino’s Grotesque does a similar thing in a more modern setting. ↩
  4. This reflection sometimes is physical, such as a footnote rendered in mirrored text or blue boxes revealing reversed versions of the text on the previous page, as if a window. ↩

One Response to “House of Leaves and Some Thoughts About Multiple Points-of-View”

  1. It’s funny, because to be honest, I thought House Of Leaves would have been infinitely better without the Truant sections. The Navidson Record is insanely interesting, and the Zampanó parts are too, but, jeeezus could I find a way to care even less about the skanky strippers Truant is fucking between going “OH NOES SCAAAARY BOOK!!?!??!?!?!?!?” — it is doubtful.