The ABCs of POV: Fourth-Person Narration

Photo by Mario Purisic on Unsplash.

Fourth person is even less common and less discussed than second. Fourth person uses “we” and “our” pronouns, in which the story is told from the perspective of a group or collective.

You might find yourself switching between singular and plural pronouns when you’re writing in first-person; e.g. “Susan and I were running late, so we hurried to the bus stop.” This is not fourth person, as the narrator is still telling the story from a single point of view. In fourth person, the narration is always from a group’s perspective and singular pronouns generally aren’t used. 

Example of Fourth-Person Narration:

Here is an example of fourth-person narration from the dystopian novel On Such a Full Sea by Chang-Rae Lee:

“It is known where we come from, but no one much cares about things like that anymore. We think, Why bother? Except for a lucky few, everyone is from someplace, but that someplace, it turns out, is gone. You can search it, you can find pix or vids that show what the place last looked like, in our case a gravel,colored town of stoop-shouldered buildings on a riverbank in China, shorn hills in the distance. Rooftops a mess of wires and junk. The river tea-still, a swath of black. And blunting it all is a haze that you can almost smell, a smell, you think you don’t want to breathe in.

“So what does it matter if the town was razed one day, after our people were trucked out? What difference does it make that there’s almost nothing there now? It was on the other side of the world, which might as well be a light-year away. Though probably it was mourned when it was thriving. People are funny that way; even the most miserable kind of circumstance can inspire a genuine throb of nostalgia. 

“The blood was pumping, yes?

“Weren’t we alive!”

The “we” in On Such a Full Sea represents the close-knit community of B-Mor, a Baltimore of the future. The story does follow a specific character, Fan, a tank-diver in charge of the community’s aquariums, as her boyfriend disappears and she sets off on a quest to find him. Fan isn’t a very distinct character and instead feels like a representative of the community. She also doesn’t have a lot of agency, which is thematically appropriate, since the story explores themes of captivity, freedom, capitalism, and colonialism.

Like second person, fourth person can create feelings of distance in the reader simply because they will not be used to the narration style. It’s a fitting choice if you want to narrate from the perspective of a community (in sci-fi or fantasy, this could even be a species that is a collective and does not have individual identities); to indicate some kind of dissociation, similar to how N.K. Jemisin uses second-person in The Fifth Season; or to encourage readers to feel like outsiders looking in.

Published Oct 3, 2025