Point of View and Greater Things that Don't Matter

I made my husband watch The Fall with me last night.  In it, Roy (Lee Pace) and a little girl named Alexandria (Catinca Untaru) are patients in a hospital, where they strike up a friendship as he tells her visually striking stories.  Horror ensues.

One of my favorite things about it is how it's clearly from Alexandria's point of view.  Most of the plot around how Roy was injured and what he's up to are told in the background, overheard in another room while the camera focuses on Alexandria making shadow puppets.  She doesn't understand and doesn't really care.  She cares about hearing more of the story, entertaining herself, and making the people she loves happy, and that is the focus of the movie.  The rest happens around her and the viewer is able to piece it all together without being spoon fed.   

This device is also one of the reasons I love my favorite book, Howl's Moving Castle.  Which is a fantasy story about Sophie, a girl under a curse that makes her old.  She ends up working as the cleaning lady for the Wizard Howl in his castle, which (you guessed it) moves around.

This story is presented from Sophie's point of view.  Even as important things are happening around her, just in her periphery, her main concerns are issues that directly affect her: her sisters' welfare, Howl's antics, the state of the bathroom,  etc.

From the first chapter, "The most interesting thing was the talk from the customers.  Nobody can buy a hat without gossiping.  Sophie sat in her alcove and stitched and heard that the Mayor never would eat green vegitables, and that Wizard Howl's castle had moved round to the cliffs again, really that man, whisper whisper, whisper...The voices always dropped low when they talked of Wizard Howl, but Sophie gathered that he had caught a girl down in the valley last month.  "Bluebeard!" said the whispers, and then became voices again to say the Jane Farrier was a perfect disgrace the way she did her hair.  That was one who would never attract even the Wizard Howl, let alone a respectable man.  Then there would be a fleeting, fearful whisper about the Witch of the Waste.  Sophie began to feel that Wizard Howl and the Witch of the Waste should get together."

I like this because it feels true to life.  If someone were to write a story about me, even though great and terrible things are happening around the world, they only have a tangential effect on my life, on my story.  They would be background.  Even though I care about politics, I care about other things more.

I also feel like this is a difficult narrative trick to pull off, and I appreciate how well it's done in both these instances.  For it to work, a writer has to give enough information to allow the reader to piece it all together, but to do it in such a way that it's not like zooming the camera in on it, lingering, and shouting, "Checkhov's gun!  Checkhov's gun!"  They have to do it in a way that feels true to the character, and in doing so, it'll set up a feedback loop, making the characterization better.  "This character does not care about these things, and now you know more about them!"