Reader responses to shifts in point of view: An empirical study

Abstract

This paper reports an empirical study that investigates reader responses to a prominent narrative phenomenon in Virginia Woolf’s novels: shifts in point of view. While the frequent viewpoint shifts in Woolf’s novels have been noted by critics and literary linguists, only a limited amount of research has been conducted to examine how ‘ordinary readers’, that is, readers without much literary or linguistic training, respond to this stylistic feature. In order to gain a better understanding of this issue, the current study combines qualitative and quantitative approaches in the investigation. The main experiment material is a passage from To the Lighthouse, in which the narrative viewpoint shifts between two characters. For the purpose of comparison, another three passages containing a consistent narrative point of view were also selected. A re-reading task was set up: in the first reading, participants read for general comprehension, and in the second reading, they were asked to identify whose point(s) of view each passage is narrated from. After assigning narrative point of view to the four passages, participants were instructed to rate each passage between 1 and 6 both in terms of difficulty in comprehension and in terms of difficulty in viewpoint attribution. Results obtained from this study show that a significant number of participants identified shifts in point of view and that this narrative phenomenon tends to require more reading time and processing effort.