Point of View

Mabanckou utilizes a first person narrative throughout Black Moses. The novel is told exclusively through Moses’ perspective as he recalls his childhood and life up until this point. At the end of the novel, the reader discovers Moses’ had been telling his story from a penitentiary for the mentally ill. The novel has been his confessional script, exploring the lead up to his murder of the mayor. The reader realizes that he has been telling his story from a position of mental illness and faulty memory which places a question mark over the reliability of his account. We do not realize this until the end of the novel, trusting his relation of events up until this point. As such, his account of events prior to this revelation are still believable and difficult to dismiss, as the reader has already read his story through the lens...