Point of View

The entirety of The Last Animal deploys a third-person point of view that adopts a somewhat flexible perspective but is primarily attached to one of the novel's protagonists, Vera. The closeness of the narrator to Vera allows Ausubel to explore the ways in which the events of the novel come to bear on Vera's wellbeing, a necessary step for a novel so concerned with considering the ways in which global and personal traumas impact the experience of girlhood. However, the decision to keep her narrator somewhat detached from Vera (and not to use Vera as a first-person narrator) allows Ausubel to blur the line between fabulist and realist interpretations of the novel's events, lending both objectivity and the distortion of Vera's emotional perspective.

Although the novel deals with plots and themes that have vast, global implications, the meat of the novel is really concerned with...