Point of View

The novel is told from the point-of-view of a mostly omniscient third person narrator who alternates their focus from one character to the next as the plot progresses and the drama of Simon's heart unfolds. The reason the narrator is “mostly” omniscient is because they feign ignorance occasionally when it comes to certain characters' emotions, namely the grief experienced by Marianne and Sean. This is a clever rhetorical device that gestures toward the size of their loss; their feelings cannot be fully expressed. At the estuary, when the couple reach the pinnacle of their grief, the narrator admits, “I don't even know what they are thinking about at that second: probably about Simon – where he was before he was born, where he is now – or maybe they're not thinking about anything, their minds entirely captured by this vision of the world slowly vanishing” (125). Despite this...