Timeline, plot, story and point of view
structuralists like Tzvetan Todorov and Roland Barthes have shown us ways of looking at how stories are constructed, especially across dimensions of time and narration.

In everyday life a speaker relates events according to chronology, but in complex works of fiction, there's a distinction between 'plot' and 'story'. The plot in effect reveals the story, but often rearranging the timeline of the events. This way the reader discoveres the original events that they need to know to understand the whole story during the narration.

Roland Barthes: "...the units of a squence, although forming a whole at the level of that very sequence, may be separated from one another by the insertion of units from other sequences..."

An oral tale usually consists of a speaker telling of past events either from a first person perspective (if the speaker was involved) or from a third person perspective (if the speaker was only an onlooker). Modern writing, however, is more complicated and uses devices such as narrator, voice and point of view in a more inventive manner to insert different facets of human psychology into their work.



Third person
The omniscient third-person narrator may choose to guide the reader's understanding of characters and the significance of their story. This type of narrator may be intrusive (commenting and evaluating, as in the novels of Austen, Dickens, and Tolstoy), or unintrusive (describing without much commentary, as in Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Hemingway's short stories). Another possibility is third-person limited (and with it, successive third person limited), probably the most frequently used point of view in contemporary fiction. Here the narrative voice limits itself to describing in the third-person only what is experienced by one character, or a series of characters in succession (stream-of-consciousness narration fits into this category).
The character who fills the role of filtering the events of the story to the reader is sometimes called a "focalizer"-he or she provides the focus for the story. This kind of narration is also referred to as selective omniscience and multiple selective omniscience - the story is told as if it is coming directly from the minds of the characters, but the narrative voice has access to some of those minds and is thus "selectively omniscient."

First person
The first-person narrator is generally a character within the story and therefore limited in understanding. He or she might be an observer who happens to see the events of the story or play a minor role in the action ("I" as witness as in Melville's Moby-Dick [1851]), or might be the main character ("I" as protagonist as in J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye [1951]).
This is the most common way of looking at point of view--but it isn't the only way. The narratologist Wayne C. Booth, for example, (The Rhetoric of Fiction [1961]) uses as his main distinction whether a narrator is dramatized or impersonal. According to this scheme, the intrusive, authorial narrator telling a story in the third person is in the same category as the first person narrator because both are dramatized. The emphasis here is on the way the narrator appears to the reader, the effect the narrative voice has on the reading experience.

You, "the author," and authorial voice
Your characters are not the only ones that end up having a voice in your fiction. Surveys of readers have shown that the impression they have of the "author," the teller of the tale, also influences their experience of the story. For this reason, a distinction is sometimes made also between the narrator, the author, and the implied author; the implied author is a presence inferred by the reader as the guiding personality behind the work, not necessarily synonymous with the actual author, who may have written other books with a different "voice," thus creating different implied authors.
Voice refers to the controlling presence or "authorial voice" behind the characters, narrators, and personae of literature. It is also described as the implied author. The particular qualities of the author's voice are manifested by her or his method of expression (an ironic narrator, a lyric persona), specific language, and so forth.

There are a few other interesting terms to know when considering the many possibilities of point of view beyond first person and third person limited:

• The self-conscious narrative, which draws attention to its own fictional nature
  The self-reflexive narrative, which describes an act of fictional composition within its story (like a play-within-a-play)
• The fallible or unreliable narrator, as in Henry James' The Turn of the Screw (1898)
• Editorial omniscience--Narrative dominated by authorial voice, speaking as "I" or "we"; the tendency is away from scene and towards summary narrative. (Henry Fielding's Tom Jones).
• Neutral omniscience--No direct comments by the author, but the scene is rendered as the author sees it and not as any individual character sees it.

http://www.ruthnestvold.com/narratology.htm

Reading and thinking about the point of view in literature makes me think about hte point of view in painting:

Velasquez "Las Meninas"
the viewer being the person (The King and Queen [in the mirror on the back wall]) who is being painted whilst the overall painting looks like it's about the girls on the painting.

Mark Tansey "Forward retreat"
at first sight this painting looks upside down, but it is actually the reflection in the water. The reflection of the backwards horsemen as well as the items you can see sticking out of the surface of the water make me wonder about the events possibly taking place.
Norman Rockwell "Triple self-portrait"
this is another good example of play with point of view in a painting.