comment on point of view

Catch the Rabbit is narrated in the first person by Sara, who alternates sections of the narrative with flashbacks to her childhood, adolescence, and college years in Bosnia. Each flashback begins and ends with a bracket, bestowing a parenthetical status on the past that Sara so desperately wants to run from. The most dramatic of these takes place in Chapter 3, about a quarter of the way through the novel: “[Death is gradual at first, then sudden” being the first sentence (50). In this way, readers are given a window into the point of view not only of Sara, but all Bosnians who witnessed the horror and darkness of the Bosnian War. Sara’s narration is, in this sense, unique to her, but historically situated, in such a way that she speaks for all young people who grew up in a war-torn land of ethnic strife and violence.