Point of View

Other Birds jockeys between two forms of perspective. The majority of the novel is told in a close third-person that shifts perspectives between the novel’s living characters. Though Zoey gets the brunt of the time, the narrator sometimes hews closely to Charlotte, Mac, Frasier, and Oliver’s perspectives as a means of diversifying the information presented to the reader. Each of these third-person perspectives is limited, which is to say that, for example, the narrator does not know everything that Charlotte knows when narrating from Zoey’s perspective. But through the accumulation of these shifting third-person perspectives, the text arrives at a form of narrative omniscience. That is to say, though the narrator is always limited to the perspective of the character they happen to be attached to in a given section or chapter, the reader ultimately derives a near-encyclopedic knowledge of the novel...