Point of View

The story is told from the first person, past tense point of view of narrator and protagonist Bethia Mayfield. What's particularly interesting about the way Bethia tells her story is that in each of the book's three parts she starts that part's story clearly stating its outcome, or at least a degree of it, then goes back and explains how she arrived at that outcome. In other words, she starts at the ending and goes back to the beginning, dropping enough hints in the first few paragraphs about that ending, or the situation in which she has found herself, to make the reader irresistibly interested in reading on.

Another aspect about point of view to consider is the work's thematic, or moral point of view. As suggested elsewhere in this analysis (primarily in the analysis on Section 12, Part 3). For most of the novel, the author seems...