Point of View

The novel is narrated by the main character. The narration is written in the first person and the past tense. As a result, the novel is told entirely from the perspective of the narrator, meaning the reader never has any information that the narrator herself does not have. The one exception to this rule is that the reader likely has various pieces of background information that the Memory Police have erased from the narrator’s mind. As a result, despite the fact that the story is told from the narrator’s perspective, the reader’s perspective might be more aligned with R’s perspective in certain ways. Because R retains memories, he never forgets the true value of the things that the Memory Police have erased, which is why R urges the narrator to find ad save outlawed objects.

This bifurcation of perspective also allows...