Point of View

The Lonely Londoners is written from a third person omniscient point of view. The author employs this lens in order to create an intimacy between the reader and the diverse set of characters in novel. By granting the reader access to the internal thoughts and emotions of Moses, Tanty, Galahad, Cap, and Big City, amongst others, Selvon allows his audience to empathize with their individual plights and aspirations. Moses’s melancholy and fear “as the years go by wondering what it is all about” holds the same narrative weight as Galahad’s optimism and ability to be “like duck back when rain fall—everything running off” (76). If Selvon had written The Lonely Londoners from the first-person point of view of one character, he would not have been able to explore the varying emotional responses and experiences of the characters who travel to London from the...