Point of View

The Tears of the Giraffe is written in the third-person point of view with the narrator being the author, Alexander McCall Smith. The use of the third-person point of view allows the author to provide background and other information to the reader. This avoids the problems of the first person point of view where the knowledge of the reader is limited to events that occur in the presence of the storyteller. The reader has a better overall picture of the action of the novel of this kind with the third person point of view. This is true in situations like the backgrounds of the two orphan children, Motholeli and Pusa.

There is plenty of dialogue between the different characters in the novel. This allows the reader to become familiar with the personalities of the different characters and to see how they interact with one another. The...