Point of View

After the copyright information and the table of contents, the novel begins with a false title page that sits opposite a portrait of our narrator. The title page declares the history of the Targaryens is "by Archmaester Gyldayn of the Citadel of Oldtown (here transcribed by George R. R. Martin)" (1). And so even before we read the first sentence of the history, the reader is aware that everything which follows has been chosen for us by a single narrator who controls the scope and span of the history and decides what we do and do not get to see. Gyldayn is an earnest and mostly trustworthy narrator. He is consumed with a desire to present all sides of the story and is constantly looking to different sources of various alliances in order to balance them all out: “Septon Eustace and Mushroom do not always agree...