Point of View

The novel is written from the first person point of view of the main character Owen. Because Owen is a young man profoundly at odds with his life in Kentucky, the narrative plot, conflict, and stakes are largely dictated by Owen’s narration. The reader might refer to those passages in which Owen either attends creative writing classes or considers the relationship between fiction and reality in order to better understand his narrative vantage. For example, at the start of Owen’s Jungle Narratives course, his professor, Tony, tells the class that when everything in a story is “filtered through [one character’s] consciousness,” the entirety of that story is “therefore inflected by his biases and aversions” (33). This notion is evidenced throughout Groundskeeping. Indeed, each detail and scene of the novel is filtered through Owen’s distinct lens. Thus the narrative’s primary tensions and...