Then there is the third person. If the first person invites intimacy and the omniscient narrator allows for perspective, the third person strikes a balance between the two. Actually, it can strike any number of balances—it’s the attempt to define precisely these various degrees of intimacy versus perspective that leads the obsessive to describe twenty-six different flavors of point of view. It’s much less complicated simply to treat the third-person point of view as a continuum, running from narrative intimacy to narrative distance.
