Point of View

The novel is written from various points of view. Portions of each chapter are written from the third person point of view. Although this third person narrator recurs over the course of the novel, the effect is not the same throughout. For example, while the third person narrator traces the lives of Alice and Mary Osgood in Chapter 3 and employs free indirect discourse, in portions of Chapters 2, 6, and 8, the third person narrator directs her attention to the natural world. In Chapter 2, for example, after the human inhabitants leave the page, the narrator describes what remains, saying: “Days pass. Snakes settle into the warm coves between the stones. A wolf pack gathers briefly in the lee of the cabin; the pups chase white butterflies by the pond” (21). In a passage such as this one, the third person narrator provides insight into the narrative setting that the...