POV characters

A Song of Ice and Fire is told in the third person and the past tense, but never from above. Each chapter sits inside one character's head and sees only what that character sees, and those characters are its point of view characters. They come in three kinds. Major ones carry the bulk of the story, and their chapters are headed with nothing but a name. Minor ones, a category that begins in A Feast for Crows, take a descriptive title in place of a name and appear when the story has need of them. Prologue and epilogue characters get a single chapter apiece, standing outside the main sequence at the opening or the close of a book.