Point of View

Ghosts is written from a first-person point of view, through the lens of Nina Dean as she navigates finding love and reconciling her age at thirty-two. Alderton chooses to employ this perspective in order to further her thematic examinations of both identity and aging. As a thirty-two year old woman, Nina struggles to delineate a concrete sense of self and come to terms with her adulthood. The protagonist craves “the safety and comfort of [her] childhood” which feels increasingly distant as she watches her father’s illness worsen and feels isolated from her friends (262). Through the first-person point of view, the author mirrors Nina’s feelings of loneliness; she has to confront her own mortality, desires, and relationship with her parents without the protective shield of innocence. If Alderton had employed a third person point of view, the narrative would have suggested that Nina was...