Point of View

The point of view of The Floating World is third-person limited. The narrative shifts between the five living members of the Boisdoré family. Despite the shifting perspectives the plot consistently progresses; the novel does not “relive” the same incidents through different characters’ eyes. The third-person limited perspective gives the reader unmediated access to the thoughts and feelings of all five Boisdorés, access that the other characters do not have. The effect of this access is that the reader understands the emotional dynamics at play between all of the family members more thoroughly than the characters themselves do. These dynamics can be difficult to track, and are perhaps intentionally so: in shifting between narrators, the novel portrays the emotional messiness of family relations.

The novel begins and ends with sections narrated by Cora, and the longest uninterrupted section with a single narrative perspective likewise belongs...