In Butler's three previous novels the primary focus of interest in matters of narrative technique has been on voice— the individual voices of the characters, to be sure, but most importantly on the narrator's voice and the identity of that narrator. Thus in Jujitsu for Christ the narrator is surprisingly revealed at the end of the novel to be Marcus Gandy; in Nightshade the narrator turns out, again at the end, to have been the artificial intelligence Mandrake; and in Living in Little Rock with Miss Little Rock the narrator identifies Him/Her/Itself in the book's opening line as the Holy Ghost.

It comes as a surprise, then, to a reader familiar with Butler's tricks, that the narrator of Dreamer appears to be a more or less standard, third-person narrator with a limited-omniscient point of view. The principal "viewpoint character" throughout is Jody Nightwood, whose thoughts...