Point of View Character versus Main Character?

In short, yes.

The person telling the story does not have to be the main character. Example, in plays the narrator is often a seperate person who is outside the actual play. The audience sees him/her, but the others do not know he/she is there.

There might be a point where you have to explain how this person knows some of things they weren't there to see, but sometimes that's never needed.

Basically, if you are telling a story in third-person you are telling the story from the point of view of someone who is not the main character. Now, you can choose to reveal who the narrator is or to keep him or her faceless. That is all up to you.

-Kathryn

~2008: Growing Up Maddox- winner~
~2009: The Life of Ivy~

"There are moments when I want nothing more than to never write again. It’s stressful and painful and drives me to the very edges of madness." -Ivy (Me)

Thank you for the comment, Luckybear!

I know about the "placeholder narrator", who tells the story but isn't in the story, but that's not the conundrum I've written myself into. What I did was start with the idea one character would be the main character, so I'm writing the story from her point of view, but then she meets someone who is more important to the plot, and more "main character"y than she is.

It might be easier if I just give a summary of my plot: the girl, the main character at the opening, whitnesses her father's death. Then she meets the Grim Reaper, who comes to collect her father, and she fights against the Grim Reaper and wagers to get her father back. The Grim Reaper is stumped, but goes along with it because the girl has such force of character, but then he starts getting "killed" by the other gods of death because he's not supposed to help living people. And the story shifts to being more about him, and his running away, and trying to figure out how to be a Reaper when he doesn't actually want to kill any more. So, my main character is an acting part of the story, but suddenly she's become second, and the story about the Reaper is much more interesting. And I'm wondering if that's legal?

It's perfectly okay to do this. The Great Gatsby is like that, Gatsby is the main character, but Nick narrates the story. Breakfast at Tiffany's very smilar. I personally consider Zaphod Beeblebrox to be the main character of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, even though Arthur Dent is the one who we see the events through. The Sherlock Holmes stories are told in POV od Dr Watson. etc etc. So it's a common literary device. If it suits your story then go for it.

Reasons to do it could be that the main character doesn't have the self awareness to tell their own story, that they're sort of oblivious to things. Or you might want to keep the main character kind of mysterious. Or we need a narrator to be a substitute for us, so they can ask the main character things. Dr Watson is one of that sort, he asks Holmes on our behalf about his methods. That's much more interesting than doing it in Holmes' POV and have him just thinking about his methods.

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Yeah, it's an excellent point. And the mystery is definitely a big part of it. Another reason is because my "main character" is going towards an emotional breakdown, and so I'm finding it much more interesting to watch him crumble rather than have to "listen in" on all of his fears, obsessions, and inconsistencies.

That reminds me of "Lord Jim" by Joseph Conrad. Marlow does his best to piece together the life and motivations of Jim, speculating at length on his psychological state, interviewing people who knew him in order to get a better picture of him. The first few chapters focus on Jim from an omniscient point of view, but after that Marlow takes over.

I think the best first person narrators are characters who either think highly of themselves, but really don't know what's going on (Severian in "The Book of the New Sun"), characters who are obsessed with other characters (Marlow in "Lord Jim" and "Heart of Darkness"; John Dowell in Ford Madox Ford's "The Good Soldier"), or, of course, characters who are losing their grip on reality (the narrators in Gogol's "Diary of a Madman" and Lu Xun's "A Madman's Diary").

Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.
--Edward Gibbon

Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion was panned by the critics initially for this very reason. The narrative changes throughout the whole book from character to character which some thought made reading the story confusing. He used clever little cues to indicate when the narrator had changed. The book is considered now to be one of the most important literary works about the NW US and one of Kesey's best novels. We can do whatever we wish. There are no rules. If the story is good and the characters are real none of us pay much attention to the nuances of person and narrative. In The Lord of the RIngs the main character changes to focus on the event at the time. In each of the events taking place, many of which are simultaneous in real time, the event is described focusing on a main character who has the most important role in that event.
Writing is freedom at it's best.

The Stone Diary by Carol Shields also used a similar technique - the book was about the life of one person, but narrated through the eyes of everyone else around her (can't remember whether it was in first or third).

What comes after NaNo? National Novel Publishing Year! http://www.nanopubye.org