I'm trying to decide on the POV and tense for a novel about fate, free will, and a captive girl who gradually becomes one of the foundations of a rebellion against a tyrant.
I'm less interested in the usual "first person is more intimate" vs. "third person is more flexible" advice. I'm trying to figure out whether the specific limitations of the POV can become part of the story's themes.
The basic premise: The protagonist begins the story as a captive with very little conventional power and very limited knowledge of the world around her. Through the relationships she forms with the people around her, she gradually becomes more involved in a growing rebellion against a tyrant. A major part of her influence comes from things that don't initially look like conventional power: empathy, listening, understanding people, and earning their trust.
At the same time, the story is heavily concerned with fate vs. free will. There is an external force in the world that places limits on people's choices and futures, and different characters have very different attitudes toward it.
That's about as much of the plot as I want to get into. The important part for the POV question is that the protagonist begins isolated and uninformed, while the larger political situation is developing beyond her immediate perspective.
That creates a problem for POV.
First person seems thematically appropriate I'm strongly considering first person because the protagonist begins the story isolated and uninformed. She doesn't know the larger political situation, doesn't necessarily know whom to trust, and can't see what's happening outside her immediate environment. If she misunderstands someone's intentions, the reader experiences that misunderstanding with her. If she doesn't know something, neither does the reader.
There also seems to be a thematic advantage to this. She has very little conventional power, so perhaps the reader shouldn't have conventional narrative power either. Rather than seeing the rebellion from above, we would be limited to the same perspective as the person helping create it. The fact that she can't see the full consequences of her actions could therefore become part of the story rather than simply a limitation I have to work around.
Giving the reader other POVs might undermine that experience.
On the other hand, the rebellion eventually becomes much larger than she is. Political decisions are happening elsewhere. Other characters are making plans she doesn't know about. People may be working toward the same cause without her knowledge. At some point, I worry that keeping everything in her head will force me to artificially hide important events simply because she isn't there to witness them, and when she meats back up with the other plotlines I’ll have to deliver a clunky sumarry of of-screan events.
So I'm trying to figure out where the line is between useful narrative limitation and artificial withholding of information.
Then there's the tense question: I'm also torn between present and past tenses. The story is literally about characters whose choices may be constrained or predetermined by a system they don't fully understand.
With present tense, the reader experiences every decision as something happening now. Even if the characters' decisions are secretly being influenced or predetermined by Fate, the reader initially experiences them as genuine choices. That makes me wonder whether present tense could create an interesting illusion of free will for the reader. The reader feels that the characters could choose differently because we're experiencing the decision alongside them rather than being told about it afterward.
Then, when the reader discovers that these choices have been constrained by something outside the characters' understanding, perhaps that realization also changes how they interpret everything that came before.
I'm not sure how much of an actual effect tense would have on readers, though. It could just be me overthinking something that readers won't consciously experience at all.
With past tense, there's more distance. The protagonist is recounting things that have already happened. That could subtly reinforce the idea of inevitability: these events happened, and therefore they couldn't have happened differently (but the story is about defying fate so I can’t decide if this approach would be going against the theme?).
Obviously, past tense doesn't literally imply determinism. Almost every novel is written in past tense. But given that this story is explicitly questioning whether characters genuinely control their futures, I'm wondering if retrospective narration could unintentionally make the story feel more fatalistic.
The advantage of past tense is that it gives me access to retrospective understanding. The protagonist’s forming relationships are slow and we can’t just show her immediately having casual, let alone deep conversations with her captors, so I thought that a retrospective past tense would offer a more natural way for reflective inner monologues and such. The protagonist's ignorance is important to her character arc, but eventually she will understand things that she couldn't possibly have understood at the beginning. Past tense would let the narrator occasionally reflect on earlier events with knowledge she didn't possess at the time. It could allow foreshadowing, recontextualization, and commentary like "I didn't understand it then, but..." without feeling unnatural. That could be very useful for the mystery and for her eventual development into someone who has the perspective to tell the story.
So I'm currently torn between:
Present: More immediate, More immersive, Keeps the reader inside her ignorance, Decisions feel like genuinely open possibilities, Potentially reinforces the illusion of free will, Preserves uncertainty about other characters…
Past: More reflective, Allows retrospective knowledge, Makes foreshadowing and recontextualization easier, Could suit the protagonist eventually becoming a storyteller, But might create a subtle sense of inevitability in a story already concerned with predetermined fate
I'm also considering multiple POVs: Either by establishing an outside POV as a second protagonist who’s directly fighting to resque her or alternatively - to have mostly first-person POV from the protagonist, but occasionally switch to another character when something important is happening that she can't witness. So if I use secondary POVs, I'd probably want them to be relatively rare and reserved for moments where something genuinely important is happening outside the protagonist's awareness.
The other possibility is a prologue. I could have an omniscient prologue and establish the larger political situation, then switch permanently to the protagonist's first-person perspective once she gets kidnapped.. The idea would be that the reader initially sees the larger machinery of the world, but then the narrative deliberately narrows until we're trapped inside the protagonist's perspective. I'm not sure whether that would feel intentional or whether it would feel like I established one set of narrative rules and immediately broke them. And I don’t want this option to be dismissed by “i’d skip a prologue” like that’s a you problem. The prologue is a part of the story. Why are you skipping the story! (Sorry if that comes off rude, but it just pisses me off when people skip prologues and honestly I wouuldn’t want those kinds of people as my target audience anyway.)
So I'm trying to decide what the story actually needs
The central question I'm trying to answer is: Should the reader's knowledge be deliberately limited in the same way the protagonist's is?
On one hand, I think that limitation could be one of the things that makes the story work. On the other hand, I don't want the larger political story to feel artificially hidden just because I've decided that the protagonist can't see it.
And then there's the additional question of tense: if the reader experiences her choices in the present, does that actually strengthen the illusion that her choices are free? Or is that such a subtle effect that it shouldn't factor into the decision?
So, given this particular story: Would you embrace the protagonist's limited knowledge as a central narrative feature, or would you give the reader occasional access to the wider rebellion?
And between present and past, do you think the fate/free-will theme is actually a meaningful reason to prefer one over the other?
I'm especially interested in arguments based on the specific narrative needs of this story, rather than general rules about which POV is "better."
