Point of View

Aleksandar Hemon tells his novel “The Lazarus Project” in both the first and third-person points of view. The novel is divided into alternating chapters which take place both in 1908 and 2004, respectively. The sections occurring in 1908 are told in the third-person point of view from the standpoint of an objective narrator, Brik. These sections of the novel are the book that he has written about Lazarus. The 2004 sections are Brik’s own personal experiences as an immigrant and in his attempt to learn more about, and write about Lazarus. The alternating points of view and chapters compare and contrast Brik and Lazarus’s experiences as immigrants, and bring attention to a story – Lazarus’s – that has not received the attention Brik believed it due. The stories of Brik and Lazarus also mirror each other in many ways, providing parallel realities in the past and present. For...