**Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead **? Takes place during Hamlet.
The 1955 scenes in Back To The Future II almost all take place on the fringes of scenes from the first BTTF.
If we are including TV episodes the episode Expose from Lost shows the first season from the POV of the background extras. That’s one of the reasons I like it a lot when everyone else hates it.
How about a film to written work crossover?
Peter Watts’ fantastic short story The Things tells the story of the film The Thing from the alien’s point of view.
Deep Space Nine’s episode “Trials and Tribble-ations” is a retelling of the original series’ episode “The Trouble With Tribbles” from a different perspective.
Along similar lines, there’s Michael Chrichton’s Eaters of the Dead, filmed as The 13th Warrior starring Antonio Banderas.
It tells the story of an exiled Arabian courtier who falls in with (press-ganged by, you might say) a band of Norsemen who are returning to their homeland… and he finds himself in the middle of the Beowulf saga!
I also like the take on War of the Worlds presented in the second League of Extraordinary Gentlemen book. The Martians didn’t simply fall prey to Earth’s diseases because they had no defense. Rather, Allan Quatermain and Mina Harker convince Dr. Moreau to supply the British military with custom hybrid strains of anthrax crossed with strep, which the Brits load into their big lobbas and shell the tripods with!
Are you looking for authors who’ve written two different versions of the same story themselves, or authors who’ve done an alternate take on a story originally written by someone else? There are probably more of the latter, and most of the examples offered in this thread fall into that category.
It’s a single book, but Fingersmith by Sarah Waters is told from the perspectives of two different characters. Part One has Sue as the narrator, then it switches to Maud in Part Two, with some overlap in the events described.
You know it. When Scarlett just plain hands over Tara to Suellen, I threw the book over my shoulder and never touched it again. Scarlett would’ve murdered Suellen with her bare hands before letting that happen.
Em…isn’t there a Twilight book from Edward’s point of view, instead of Bella’s, for the same events? Looks like it’s called Midnight Sun.
We’ve had threads on this in the past. There are plenty of cases where a story, especially a famous one, is told from the point of view of a different character. Many have already ben cited, of course, but here are some others
About ten years ago, Christopher Moore told the story of King Lear from the point of view of The Fool in Fool. Moore managed to take Shakespeare’s darkest tragedy and turn it into a hilarious, obscene, anachronistic romp. Well worth the read.
Part of Robert Heinlein’s last novel To Sail Beyond the Sunset, retells the events in his earlier novel Time Enough for Love from the POV of a different character.
A 1970s humor book, My Side by Walter Wager, tells the story of King Kong from his POV.
Fred Saberhagen did the same sort of thing with his 1975 novel The Dracula Tape, which tells the story of Dracula from his POV. Dracula actually doesn’t appear “on screen” all that often in Bram Stoker’s novel, so it’s odd to see him getting a lot of “screen time” in this.
John Gardner (the one who wrote all the James Bond sequels) wrote three novels about Sherlock Holmes’ nemesis, Professor Moriarty. It’s been too long since I read the first two (the third just came out a decade ago, but I haven’t read it) to recall if they tell any of the events that Doyle wrote about from the opposite POV.
OP, would In A Grove count as what you are looking for?
The basis of Akira Kurasawa’s Rashomon, although Kurasawa’s script added even more variations.
A lot of good examples that don’t quite add up to what I was looking for, which I think is pretty good evidence that it doesn’t exist. Or possibly that my search pattern wasn’t well formed.
I think the core issue is what one would call “the story” of a book or work. In a Sherlock Holmes book for instance the solving of the mystery is a the major part of the story. Following the same events from the view point of the antagonist is an entirely different story. It would be closer to the same story if one simply changed the first person narrative, to third person, while keeping Watson as POV, but perhaps also uninteresting. Changing the tense ditto.
Changing the POV to Holmes and more elements of what I’d call the story changes …
If you’re looking for Real Life examples (as you OP has), there are plenty of historical events told from different points of view, often by different participants, which can often make it seem like a very different story. Look at all the participants’ accounts of the OJ Simpson trial, for instance.
My best example is the Salem Witchcraft Trials. I’ve read numerous accounts, and they often seem to be describing very different occurrences, although it’s all in the choice of the characters they focus on and the events they put front and center.
Zoe’s Tale is a retelling of The Last Colony from the point of view of the colony leaders’ teenage daughter.
The True Story of the Three Little Pigs by Jon Scieszka tells the familiar story from the wolf’s point of view.
I just thought of another.
Longbourn, by Jo Baker. It’s Pride and Prejudice, told from the servants’ point of view.
Here is the TV Tropes webpage on different contrasting viewpoints in a single work of art:
Here’s their webpage on different contrasting viewpoints in two works of art:
And another such webpage:
And still another such webpage:
Each of those webpages has links to other webpages with examples. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of such kinds of stories. This is one of the commonest sorts of narratives in many sorts of art forms.
Yes, but this one is from a different point of view.
I’m not quite sure I understand what you’re looking for; using the Sherlock Holmes analogy, you’d accept as a suitable example one of Doyle’s stories rewritten to be in third-person present tense, but still keeping Watson as the POV character and following the same events?
I don’t think that sort of minor tweak to an existing story happens very often in prose fiction, except in rare cases where the author is not happy with the originally-published form and decides to change things for a newer edition. It doesn’t seem like a significant enough change in effect to be worth another author’s trouble.