Point of View

A Single Man is narrated from the point of view of a third-person omniscient narrator, who occasionally veers into free indirect discourse — speech which, in brief, can be read as occurring either from the narrator or from the characters which he narrates. The whole book details a day in George's life, as he wakes, gets ready for work, delivers a lecture on English literature, meets his friends, runs into a student at a bar, and dies of a heart attack in the middle of the night. There are no chapter breaks, and for the most part, each 'scene' occurs one after the other, thus resulting in a stream of ever-occurring narrative. In the hands of other authors, "A Single Man" might therefore come across as intimate; after all, describing one character's daily activities — which are as minute as his going to the bathroom and as...