Point of View

The point of view of Nothing is almost exclusively first-person, from the perspective of one of the students at the middle school named Agnes. Agnes is a 13- or 14-year-old girl living in a small town in Denmark whose life is upended by one of the characters' proclamations that nothing in the world has inherent meaning. She is an interesting and somewhat objective narrator in the sense that she embodies what life is like as a young teenager in the small town, but she does not have anything particularly noteworthy that she believes fiercely. Her perspective is a more objective one than were the novel from the perspective of someone like Holy Karl, who clearly has a specific allegiance and way of thinking about the world. Agnes is much more malleable in her perspective. The first-person narration allows the reader a direct insight into how...