Point of View

The point of view in Canada is first person singular, using terms like "I" or "me," and the narrator of this first person account is Dell. The use of first person provides readers with an immediacy, and it also permits an intimacy with Dell as he tells his difficult story. This intimacy also titillates, since readers feel that Dell’s dark, secret past is not an account he shares with many people, since at the end of the novel he says how the only other person he has told about his peripheral role in the murders is his wife Clare. Dell does not even tell Berner before she dies, so the past he has dragged around for so long has affected him deeply.

The novel’s point of view also influences the events that Dell relates, the way characters are portrayed, and the conclusions that...