Point of View

Most of Leon Uris's The Haj is told in the first person point of view. The narrator is Ishmael, and it is his point of view that the reader experiences throughout the book. There are sections of the book that are in the third person point of view, such as the meeting in Zurich. In these instances, there is a third-person impersonal narrator.

This shifting of the point of view is made clear on the first page of Chapter 1, where Ishmael says that sometimes he will speak in his own voice and other times other people will talk in their own voices. So even though the point of view shifts, most of the book takes place in the presence of Ishmael.

Usually the first person point of view confines the reader to events that occur in the presence of the narrator. Since Uris uses the first...