Point of View

My Brilliant Life is written from the first person point of view of the main character, Areum. Areum's character provides a unique narrative vantage point in that he is a 16-year-old boy living with progeria, a disease which, he says, "made me age quicker than normal" (64). When Areum is two, his parents notice that something is wrong. They soon learn that his rare condition is making his body grow old faster than normal. Therefore, Areum's character straddles two temporal extremes. He is numerically the age of a teenager, yet his body appears like that of an elderly person on the edge of death. Living between these two vastly different phases of life, makes Areum feel that he knows "nothing about the lives of older people or the thoughts and problems of the youth" (34). As a teenager, he finds it difficult to connect with the old...