Storyteller’s Rulebook: The Value of Rowling’s Omniscient Third Person

It’s my opinion that readers crave as few points of view as possible. I prefer either first person or third person that’s strictly limited to one head. But writers love to skip from head to head, because it’s more convenient to tell a story that way, and Rowling is no exception. The first chapter begins in Mr. Dursley’s POV, then switches to McGonagall’s, then to Dumbledore, and only in Chapter 2 do we switch to Harry, where we will remain for most of the rest of the book.

But there’s also a fourth POV here, and it’s the one that makes all the others work: Rowling’s own. The very first time we leave a POV, as Mr. Dursley goes to sleep, on our way out the window to McGonagall, we pause for a one sentence paragraph where Rowling inserts her own voice.

The POV isn’t just idly wandering from one character to the next, our goddess is plucking it away from one character, commenting directly to us about what a fool he is, and then safely setting us back down in the POV of McGonagall.

In the above excerpt, “How very wrong he was,” makes all the difference. It establishes that we have omniscient third-person narration, and that our omniscient third-person narrator might sometimes, very rarely, have something to say directly to us. This isn’t Harry’s book, it’s J. K. Rowling’s, and she’s going to show some character herself.

Even before this, Mr. Dursley’s thoughts aren’t necessarily summarized in the way he would summarize his own thoughts, but rather in the way that Rowling would:

• Mr. Dursley was enraged to see that a couple of them weren’t young at all; why, that man had to be older than he was, and wearing an emerald-green cloak!

That “why” is key. It diminishes Mr. Dursley. It’s also a subtle hint that we’re reading a children’s book, despite the adult characters. It sounds like the narrative voice of a picture book. Even when narrating our POV character’s thoughts, Rowling’s omniscient narration is making itself heard.