Point of View

Neal Shusterman tells his novel Challenger Deep in the first-person, limited-omniscient narrative mode from the point of view of the main character, Caden Bosch. Because mental illness is such a personal struggle that those around the afflicted individual do not completely understand, Shusterman allows Caden to tell his own story. This gives readers a personal, firsthand look at mental illness, at the difficulty Caden faces in determining realities, and how Caden struggles to recover and beat his mental illness. It also creates a deeper understanding of such things as Caden’s thoughts and feelings are displayed for the reader as though Caden were confiding to a journal or a personal friend. Likewise, given Caden’s straddling of multiple realities because of his mental illness, the limited-omniscient aspect of the narrative means that Caden sometimes does something in the real world and in imagined reality of...