Point of View

The novel is largely told from the point of view of a third-person omniscient narrator in the past tense. This narrator accesses the thoughts of both major and minor characters but frequently focuses on those of Beatriz, Simonopio, Francisco, and Espiricueta. This focus manifests as chapters that narrate the experience of one character at a time. Because of this, certain significant events are narrated again from a different character’s perspective. These perspectives are deeply explored by the narrator, evident in the narrator’s use of free-indirect discourse to adopt the voice and internal dialogue of the characters: “But he still did not understand the cold. ...how did the cold manage to get inside him, into his flesh and bones?” (121). The narrator also allows the reader to access direct thoughts of the characters, sometimes using italics to signal this, like for Francisco and Beatriz’s...