Point of View

The novel is written from the third-person point of view. This third person narrator possesses omniscient capacities, which means that she has access to many of the characters’ interiors as well as to the world beyond their insular consciousnesses. Throughout the majority of the novel, the third-person narrator primarily divides her attention between Thomas Hart’s and Grace Macauley’s perspectives and thus alternately describes the narrative world according to Thomas’s and Grace’s experiences of it.

In the early sequences of Part I, for example, the narrator inhabits Thomas’s headspace, and thus presents his thoughts on the page as follows: “I’m drunk and foolish, he thought, and I ask too much of life” (49). In a moment like this one, the narrator is excavating Thomas’s private thoughts and granting the reader access to his vulnerabilities and insecurities. The same formal principles...