JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #64
August 12, 2021
One of my daughters’ favorite books is Walt Disney’s Story of the Three Little Pigs, a book from the 1970s that once upon a time included a "7-inch 33⅓ RPM long playing read-along record." I think we still have that record somewhere, but no record-player. The story is based on the 1930s Academy Award-winning Disney short, the Three Little Pigs, and the record includes the famous song, "Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" A sanitized version of the Three Little Pigs short is nowadays available on Disney+.
Anyway, I don’t know why I went into so much detail about all that: what I want to write about is a couple of lines in the written story that do some interesting things with point of view. After the Big Bad Wolf destroys Fifer Pig’s house of straw, Fifer Pig runs to join Fiddler Pig hiding in his house of sticks. Then:
This time the Big Bad Wolf decided to trick the little pigs, so he said in a loud voice, "Well, they’re too smart for me. Guess I’ll go home!" And he hid behind a big tree.
Soon the door opened and the two little pigs peeked out. There was no wolf in sight. "He’s gone!"
Notice how the perspective shifts around as we go through these lines. In general, the point of view is more or less a vague omniscient tale-teller, an unspecified speaker who can dip in and out of character perspectives and report on their inner thoughts and feelings at will. Notice how the narrator begins by reporting the Big Bad Wolf’s mind-internal deliberations: the Big Bad Wolf decided to trick the little pigs--here we are given the Wolf’s inner thoughts, and the reported state of affairs comes from his knowledge as he hides behind a big tree.
In the next paragraph, the narrator moves out of the Wolf’s perspective and gives the door subject position, taking an objective point of view upon the scene, rather than providing a glimpse of interiority for one of the pigs by saying something like "Soon Fiddler Pig opened the door," where "open" in that context would suggest (conscious) intentionality. And yet, in the next line, we dive into the pigs’ point of view with the declaration that "there was no wolf in sight." Obviously, we and the narrator both know the Wolf is behind the big tree, as has been previously described, and we know that from a certain vantage, the wolf would in fact be "in sight"; so we understand that this line is given as if from the point of view of the pigs. That leads to the unattributed speech, which we know must come from the pigs, because that’s whose point of view we’re in: "He’s gone." Only one of the pigs would say such a thing, as the Wolf does seem to have disappeared from their point of view.
In a modern workshop with a tight focus on POV, it’s possible the author would get quite a lot of feedback about this passage and how the perspective hops from head to head. But this story uses a specific and deliberate narrative point of view that grants permission for head-hopping. I’m sure most readers who are not obsessed with such concerns like I am (or who haven’t read this story a few thousand times) would glide past these POV shifts without marking them.