Point of View

God of Mercy is narrated from the third person point of view. This third person narrator vacillates between an omniscient and a free indirect mode of narrating. At the start of the novel’s prologue, the narrator describes Ichulu and its people using an unbiased stance: “Nobody in Ichulu cared for the erosion. Its tired old and its tired young were rebuilding the village indifferently. Its little ones were keeping weary smiles and discarding playtime, giving skinny dogs their place in the orange mud” (1). In this passage, the third person narrator remains unattached from any particular character’s point of view. However, in the passages following, the narrator gradually shifts in and out of various Ichulu villagers’ consciousnesses. In this way, the author allows the third person narrator access to the primary characters’ psyches, thus expanding his overarching thematic explorations.

In passages where the narrator...