In the following essay, Ruppersburg examines narration in Look Homeward, Angel, concluding that it "is a first-person novel, narrated retrospectively by a narrator who clearly sympathizes and identifies with the young protagonist."

The authors of such semiautobiographical novels as Remembrance of Things Past and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man relied on narrative point of view to maintain a critical, objective distance from their text. Thomas Wolfe, another autobiographical novelist, did the same. Though often criticized for his apparently narcissistic inability to remain separate from his story, Wolfe used point of view in Look Homeward, Angel (1929) to exploit the experiences of his own life for artistic rather than merely egotistical purposes. As a significant component of narrative form and meaning, point of view in Wolfe's first novel thus merits careful examination.

Curiously, critical opinion on the subject has been sparse and divided. Expressing the...