Point of View

Something New Under the Sun is written from the third person point of view. In the early chapters of the novel, this third person narrator is situated closest to the main character Patrick Hamlin's consciousness. The author reveals this intimate relationship between the narrator and Patrick in the novel's opening chapter. Indeed, she uses Patrick's dislocation and disorientation in California in order to render the narrative world as a synthetic version of reality. For example, while driving with Horseshoe and the Arm in Chapter 1, the narrator describes the view through the window via Patrick's lens, saying: "The city viewed from the highway has little to do with the place he had seen on the ground. It resembles an old photograph, colors faded, with a swath of flat gray rooftops close to the highway" (14). Because Patrick is not native to this place, everything about it feels...