AP® English Literature and Composition review sheet from Aim for Five (aimforfive.com/lit/units/9/9-5)
Unit 9 · Topic 9.5
9.5 Multiple perspectives and a narrator who changes
Longer works often show the same events through several characters' or narrators' eyes. A narrator can also change over the course of a story through what they do and experience. Shifts or inconsistencies in a narrator's perspective create irony and complexity.
Key terms
- multiple perspectives
- narrator
- retrospective narrator
- irony
- inconsistency
Multiple perspectives on the same events
When a novel gives you more than one view, compare them. Each perspective is shaped by what that person knows, wants and fears. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) lets both Victor and the creature tell their stories. Victor describes the creature as a "wretch" and a "devil." The creature describes years of rejection and loneliness and says, "I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend." Neither version cancels the other. Together they make the question of blame much harder.
The retrospective narrator
A retrospective narrator tells their story looking back, from a later point in life. That creates two versions of the same person: the younger self who lived the events and the older self who tells them. The gap between them is a source of irony and of meaning.
Pip, the narrator of Great Expectations (1861), is an older man looking back. When he describes how he came to be ashamed of the forge and of Joe, the older Pip judges the younger one: "It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home. There may be black ingratitude in the thing." The young Pip couldn't see this; the older Pip can't stop seeing it.
Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) also uses an adult narrator looking back at her childhood, and she sometimes speaks straight to us: "Reader, I married him."
Change and inconsistency as irony
When a narrator's perspective shifts, compare their earlier and later statements. A narrator who once praised something and now condemns it, or who claims to be fair but clearly isn't, creates irony: a gap between what is said and what is true, or between what the narrator knew then and knows now.
Ask: How does the narrator describe themselves at different points? Do they admit their earlier mistakes? Are there places where the older narrator still seems blind? Inconsistencies can show growth, or they can show that the narrator hasn't changed as much as they believe.
Questions to ask
- Whose perspective controls this chapter or scene, and whose is missing?
- Where do two perspectives describe the same event differently?
- Is the narrator telling the story as it happens or looking back? How far back?
- Where does the older narrator comment on the younger self, and what tone do they use?
- Does the narrator's view at the end match their view at the beginning?
Worked examples
Try each one yourself first, then open the solution.
- Example 1
Analyzing a narrator who has changed
In Great Expectations, the older Pip writes: "Home had never been a very pleasant place to me, because of my sister's temper. But, Joe had sanctified it, and I had believed in it." He lists what he once "believed in": the parlor, the front door, the kitchen, the forge. Then: "Within a single year all this was changed. Now it was all coarse and common." Explain how the gap between the younger and older Pip creates meaning.
Show the solutionHide the solution
- Step 1: Separate the two selves: the younger Pip, after visiting Miss Havisham's house, now sees home as "coarse and common." The older Pip is telling us this years later.
- Step 2: Look at the repetition: "I had believed in" repeats, making the lost faith sound almost religious, and "sanctified" supports that.
- Step 3: Find the older narrator's judgment: the chapter opens by calling this shame "a most miserable thing" and "black ingratitude."
- Step 4: Explain the irony: the younger Pip thinks he is rising; the older Pip knows he was falling. The gap shows how class ambition corrupted what mattered.
Answer: Sample answer: Dickens uses the distance between the younger and older Pip to show how ambition can poison love. The repeated phrase "I had believed in," along with the word "sanctified," turns Joe's humble home into something holy in memory, so its sudden fall into "coarse and common" feels like a loss of faith. The younger Pip believes he has simply outgrown the forge, but the older narrator frames the change as "black ingratitude." The irony belongs to the retrospective voice: we watch a boy feel he is rising in the world while the man he became tells us that this was the moment he began to lose himself.
Common mistakes
- Treating the older narrator's judgments as the younger character's thoughts. Keep the two selves separate.
- Choosing one character's perspective as "the truth" when the work gives you several.
- Missing irony that comes from the gap between what a narrator knew then and knows now.
On the exam
- Multiple-choice questions may ask how a narrator's later comment changes the meaning of an earlier one, or what the shift between two perspectives suggests. Look for verbs in different tenses and phrases like "I now see" or "at the time."
- In the literary argument essay, a narrator's development across the work can give you a clear line of reasoning from beginning to end.
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4 questions on 9.5 Multiple perspectives and a narrator who changes. Pick an answer to see if you got it, and why.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, Chapter 10 (1831 edition). Victor Frankenstein is the narrator.
In paragraph 1, Victor’s description of the creature’s “unearthly ugliness” is shaped chiefly by
The creature’s speeches in paragraphs 7 and 9 complicate Victor’s narration chiefly by
The creature’s statement “I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed” (paragraph 7) draws on the biblical story of creation and the fall to suggest that
The creature’s exclamation “Oh, praise the eternal justice of man!” (paragraph 9) is best described as
0 of 4 answered