M01 ande5832 04 se c01. indd

 Instructions:
Analyze the inner qualities of this character using the pairs of opposite words. Place an
X
on the line where you think the character falls on each dimension. Most characters will fall
somewhere between the two extremes. 
Source: Adapted from Liz Rothlein and Anita Meyer Meinbach,
Legacies: Using Children’s Literature in the Classroom.
New York: HarperCollins, 1996. 
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P A R T I :
Entering the World of Children’s Literature
way for the first-person narrator to reveal a realistic story is through letters and dia-
ries. Some good examples are Dear Mr. Henshaw (Cleary) and Absolutely Normal 
Chaos (Creech).
Alternating Point of View.
Sometimes an author will write a story that is told in 
first person accounts by two or more characters, called alternating point of view . 
Often, the author shifts narrators each chapter, and a single incident is sometimes 
told from two or more points of view. Katherine Applegate used this style in Ani-
morphs: The Andalite’s Gift . The main characters are five children—one of whom 
has permanently “morphed” (become transformed) into a falcon—who are fighting 
evil aliens, and each chapter is the first-person account of one of these main charac-
ters. Avi with Rachel Vail authored Never Mind! A Twin Novel, which consists of 
chapters with alternating points of view between a male and female twin. In a most 
unique writing collaboration, Avi wrote the chapters narrated by the male twin and 
Vail wrote those narrated by the female.
Omniscient.
The omniscient and all other points of view are told in third-person 
narrative, in which the narrator refers to all characters as he, she, it, or they . The 
narrator with an omniscient point of view is not a book character but rather an 
all-knowing and all-seeing voice that can relate events that are occurring simulta-
neously. In this point of view, readers are able to learn what all the characters are 
doing and thinking, what has happened in the past, and even what will occur in the 
future. A classic example of a book using an omniscient point of view is Charlotte’s 
Web (White).