Point of View

The novel is entirely narrated from a first-person point of view. The narrator, Tony, is also the novel's primary protagonist, and his perspective is told as a kind of personal history, a glance backward at the circumstances that have led him to his eventual place in life; the narrative is occasionally interrupted by small self-insertions on Tony's part to qualify particular events (or their omission). For much of the novel, Charry deploys this strategy in order to create empathy and trust for Tony in the reader, only to draw back in the novel's final moments and introduce a retroactive unreliability crucial to the novel's thesis.

Tony's narration creates an immediate sense of companionship between him and the reader, and also gives the reader a kind of guide by which to understand the complex and largely-forgotten circumstances in early colonial Virginia; in other words, since Tony...