Point of View

The novel is primarily written from the protagonist Thelonious “Monk” Ellison’s first person point of view. This narrative vantage point works in service of the narrative structure and form in that Erasure is Monk’s personal journal. At the start of Chapter 1, Monk says that because he is “afraid that others will see these pages,” he wants to establish himself as more than a writer (1). He acknowledges his love for writing, but also claims to be “a son, a brother, a fisherman, an art lover, [and] a woodworker” (1). Therefore, Monk's introduction establishes him as a self-conscious and self-doubting narrator. Although he speaks with declarative sentences, he often struggles to believe in his own ideas about fiction and story, truth and reality. His elliptical and meandering narrative voice captures his difficulty to believe in himself.

Portions of the novel employ alternate points of view. For...