Point of View

The point of view of Pony is first-person, exclusively through the lens of Silas, a twelve-year-old boy who is the only child in the novel. The author utilizes this perspective in order to gives the reader access to Silas’s inner thoughts and emotions and undermine the assertion of adult characters that youth is synonymous with ignorance. When Silas is travelling with Marshal Farmer, the old man is dismissive of his ideas because he is “just a small fry [and] don’t know much” (88). The author counters the marshal’s assertion when she divulges Silas’s internal monologue. The narrator knows that he “may be young, but [he is] curious [and] always reasonable enough to form the questions for which [he has]no answers” (116). Unlike the adult characters, Silas is aware that intelligence is not equivalent with omniscience. The dichotomy between the colloquial grammar in...