“The miner had abandoned everything to go mining for emeralds. For five years he had been working a certain river, and had exami
ned hundreds of thousands of stones looking for an emerald…the old man …transformed himself into a stone that rolled up to the miner’s foot. The miner…picked up the stone and threw it aside. But he had thrown it with such force that it broke the stone it fell upon, and there, embedded in the broken stone, was the most beautiful emerald in the world.” As it is quoted, what point of view does this excerpt represent?
In a third person narrative, the narration is from the perspective of someone outside of the story. And third person omniscient allows the third person narrator access to all of the characters' feelings and thinking. This allows for a full scale possibility of narration by the omniscient narrator.
The given excerpt from Paulo Coelho's "The Alchemist" reveals not only the miner's characters but also have access to the old man's actions and feelings. Moreover, the non-involvement of the narrator in the story makes it a third person narrative, allowing access to all of the characters. Thus, the given excerpt is viewed from the third person omniscient point of view.
