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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/29603
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/29603
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Just because a scene is written from a character's point of view does not mean it is written based only on information available to the character. The first responsibility of the narrative it to make events clear to the reader, so it should generally be written in terms of what is known to the reader.

Think about the difference between exploring a new place for the first time yourself and showing a familiar place to a new person who has not been there before. If you are familiar with the place, you will see your companion noticing features of the place, but they will be places that are known to you, and you will think of they by their usual names. You can certainly imagine, and share sympathetically in, the delight your companion is feeling in seeing the place for the first time, but you can never yourself see it with entirely new eyes again.

So your reader, once you have taken them to a place or introduced them to a person, can never entirely go back and see them with entirely new eyes, even if they are following the POV of a character who has never been there or never met this person. If you introduce Akash as if they were an entirely new person, the reader will not only assume that that Maria has not met this person, but they have not met them either. Then when that person is revealed as Akash, the reader will feel that the writer has intruded to conceal from them the identity of a character they have already met.

We tend to talk about POV as if the so-called limited POV as if it were an iron clad and wholly time-synchronous box from which the narrative could never escape. But trying to maintain that approach leads to all kinds of problems, such as the one you describe.

Life gets a lot easier if you regard all third person narratives as inherently omniscient narrative in which the writer may choose, temporarily and for effect, to follow the POV of one character, with the complete liberty to pull back to the broader view whenever narrative convenience demands it. Indeed, if you are switching POVs in a story, this is implicitly what you are doing anyway. So don't be afraid to linger in the omniscient a while between one POV and another in order to smooth the transition.

And remember that as far as the reader is concerned the entire story is experienced from the reader's POV. The author controls what that POV is at any given moment of the story, but the reader's POV is consistent and continuous from where the reader sits, and you can't, for effect, un-tell them any part of the story that you have told them already.

Original score: 7