Point of View

The Astonishing Color of After is told entirely in Leigh’s point-of-view. This creates a very personal narrative as Leigh struggles to overcome her mother’s death and understand the memories that she sees while in Taiwan. Her point-of-view is mostly reliable, as she approaches memories with honest sincerity and genuinely wants to figure out what they should mean to her. However, this shifts toward the end of the novel as she begins to see the cracks in the world because of her lack of sleep. The reader is meant to question what she is seeing while Leigh herself figures out what is real and what is not. There are also many supernatural elements that Leigh sees that others do not. Two examples of this are the bird and Feng. Leigh sees the bird everywhere she goes, whether in shadow or the tail feathers. Toward...