Point of View

The Fraud is narrated almost entirely from a third-person limited point of view which attaches itself to the perspective of the novel's protagonist, Eliza Touchet. However, there are two volumes of the eight-volume novel that are narrated in the first person by Andrew Bogle, offering a retrospective look at his travels in Jamaica and England while enslaved to or employed by Edward Tichborne. The passages narrated from Eliza's perspective allow Smith to retain a somewhat objective accounting of the novel's historical events while critiquing Eliza's reliance on selective memory, and the passages that are narrated from Bogle's perspective present a juxtaposing set of circumstances to Eliza's own that contribute to Smith's observations about race in this period of English history.

Although the narrator of Eliza's sections of the novel is a third-person one, the movements of the narrative are bound to the subjective realm of...