Point of View

The novel is told from the dying Stanley’s perspective, although the narrator’s identity is not revealed until the conclusion. Each section is written in third-person limited with occasional breaks into second person that are inexplicable and unresolved upon first reading. Even in the sections that focus on Curtis and Crivano, the reader is always in Stanley’s mind. With the repeated suggestions that Stanley has slowly slipped into madness, the reader is left to decide whether or not Stanley has fabricated the entire story. Stanley’s potential unreliability reinforces the novel’s preoccupation with the subjectivity of perception. Since Stanley tells the story from his point of view, his thoughts and projections invariably affect the narrative. A possible reading is that Stanley simply wrote an incredibly imaginative story before his death.

If the reader chooses to accept Stanley’s story as truth, then...