No reason why you shouldn't swap points of view as and when required.

I know I don't have to tell an experienced writer like you Katie, but for those starting out it's imperative that changes in POV are clearly signalled, and take place in a structured way. Unless you're an absolute master/mistress of your craft they should never, under any circumstances whatsoever, happen without the use of at least a section break.

There is nothing new about alternating from first person to third person and back. The discussion of this literary technique is extracted from a Wikipedia piece entitled ‘Narrative mode.’ I always found it is best to study other authors and the manner with which they go about telling their stories. It keeps me from trying to find a way of doing something that has already been done, rending my clothes and gnashing my teeth as I trashed about obsessing over technique rather than focusing on telling a story.

HW Coyle
a.k.a. Nancy Cole

Alternating person view

While the general rule is for novels to adopt a single approach to point of view throughout the novel's entirety, it is not mandatory to conform to this rule. Many stories, especially in literature, alternate between the third person limited and third person omniscient. In this case, an author will move back and forth between a more omniscient third-person narrator to a more personal third-person limited narrator. The Harry Potter series is told in third person limited for much of the seven novels, but deviates to omniscient in that it switches the limited view to other characters from time to time, rather than only the protagonist. However, like the A Song of Ice and Fire series and the books by George RR Martin, a switch of viewpoint is done only at chapter boundaries. The Home and the World written way back in 1916 by Rabindranath Tagore is one such book switching among just three characters at Chapter boundaries. In The Heroes of Olympus series the point of view changes between characters at intervals. Omniscient point of view is also referred to as alternating point of view, because the story sometimes alternates between characters. Often, a narrator using the first person will try to be more objective by also employing the third person for important action scenes, especially those in which they are not directly involved or in scenes where they are not present to have viewed the events in firsthand. This mode is found in the novel The Poisonwood Bible.

Epistolary novels, which were common in the early years of the novel, generally consist of a series of letters written by different characters, and necessarily switching when the writer changes; the classic books Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Dracula by Abraham "Bram" Stoker and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde take this approach. Sometimes, however, they may all be letters from one character, such as C. S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters and Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary. Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island switches between third and first person, as do Charles Dickens's Bleak House and Vladimir Nabokov's The Gift. Many of William Faulkner's novels take on a series of first-person viewpoints. E.L. Konigsburg's novella The View from Saturday uses flashbacks to alternate between third- person and first-person perspectives throughout the book, as does Edith Wharton's novel Ethan Frome. After the First Death, by Robert Cormier, a novel about a fictional school bus hijacking in the late 1970s, also switches from first- to third-person narrative using different characters. The novel The Death of Artemio Cruz, by Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, switches between the three persons from one chapter to the next, even though all refer to the same protagonist. The novel Dreaming in Cuban, by Cristina García alternates between third-person, limited and first-person perspectives, depending on the generation of the speaker: the grandchildren recount events in first-person viewpoints while the parents and grandparent are shown in the third-person, limited perspective.