Short Story Examples in Third Person: Limited and Objective, Side by Side
Quick answer: Two original third-person short stories, one in close limited and one in objective camera-eye narration, with notes on what each distance lets you do.
Third person is not one point of view but a range of distances. At the close end, the narration lives inside one character's head and borrows their vocabulary. At the far end, the narrator reports only what could be seen and heard, like a camera. The two original stories below sit at opposite ends of that range. The first, a woman on a ferry, is close limited. The second, an old couple on a porch, is objective: no thoughts named, only behaviour.
Crossing
Mireille had taken the ferry to the island every summer of her childhood and had not taken it once in the twenty-two years since, and now here she was, at the rail, with the wind doing what it had always done to her hair and her mother's ashes in a cardboard tube in her rucksack that the funeral people had called a scatter tube, as if it were a garden product. The water was the same. That was the offence of it. The same green going to grey, the same smell of diesel and salt that she had once, at nine, decided was the smell of happiness. She had expected the crossing to feel like a return. Instead it felt like an accusation. She watched a girl of about that age run the length of the deck and back, twice, and she found herself gripping the rail hard enough to hurt. The island came up out of the haze exactly where it had always been. Mireille took the tube out of the rucksack and held it against her chest under her coat, and when the ramp came down she was the first one off, walking fast, the way you walk when you are late for someone.
Two Chairs
The chairs on the porch had been there long enough to leave four pale squares on the boards. At six the man came out with two cups and set one on the arm of each chair. He sat in the left-hand chair. At six fifteen the woman came out, sat in the right-hand chair, picked up her cup, and put it down again. Neither spoke. The woman looked at the field across the road, where the corn had been cut that week. At six forty the man stood, took both cups, and went in. His cup was empty. Hers was full. He came back out with a blanket and put it over her knees, and she moved one hand to hold it there. The light went off the field. At seven the phone rang inside the house and neither of them moved to answer it. It rang eleven times. When it stopped, the woman said, 'That'll have been Ruth.' The man said, 'Yes.' They sat until it was too dark to see the field, and then he helped her up, and they went in, and the porch light came on, and the four pale squares stayed where they were.
What each distance buys
Crossing gives you Mireille's mind directly. The scatter tube 'as if it were a garden product' is her sourness, not the narrator's. 'That was the offence of it' is a judgement only she could make. Close third compresses twenty-two years and a whole relationship into how she reacts to a smell, and lets the last simile, late for someone, carry the grief she has not named. The cost is that we see nothing she does not see: the girl on the deck exists only as a trigger.
Two Chairs refuses all of that. We are never told what the woman thinks about the phone or why her cup stays full or who Ruth is. The story works because the details are chosen with intent: an empty cup and a full one, a blanket she holds with one hand. The reader supplies the illness, the daughter, the marriage, and supplies them more forcefully than the narrator could.
Choosing the distance
Go close when the story is about how a character misreads the world. Go objective when the story is about what two people do not say to each other and you trust your reader to hear it. Most stories sit between the two; moving the camera a step during revision is one of the strongest edits available.
What writers can take from this
- In close third, borrow the character's vocabulary for the narration.
- In objective third, choose details that imply thought; never state it.
- Decide the distance before drafting and hold it; drift reads as error.
- Use one physical object, a cup, a tube, as the emotional gauge.
- Read the draft and mark every sentence that reports a feeling; in objective mode, cut them all.
Try it yourself
Write the same 200-word scene twice: once in close third person from one character's head, once in objective third with no thoughts or feelings named. Notice which version makes the ending land harder.
Questions
What is the difference between third person limited and omniscient?
Limited stays inside one character's perceptions at a time; omniscient can move between minds and comment from above. Most modern short stories use limited because the single consciousness gives the form its unity.
Is third person objective the same as second person?
No. Second person addresses the reader or protagonist as 'you'. Third person objective still uses he, she and they, but reports only observable behaviour, the way a script or a camera would.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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