Point of View

The point of view of The Night Diary does not shift over the course of the novel. The narrative is told through a series of letters from the point of view of Nisha, a twelve-year-old girl, who writes to her late mother. The pronouns “I,” “me,” and “we,” are used to depict Nisha herself as well as her family unit, while the word “you” is also used when Nisha refers directly to her mother. The point of view contributes to the way in which the narrative unfolds because Nisha describes to her mother every event that takes place from her twelfth birthday to her family’s arrival in Jodhpur. As a result, Nisha speaks to her mother directly, intimately, and highly informally.

The writing of this epistolary novel is, as mentioned earlier, highly intimate. Nisha writes her letters in her own diary, thus she portrays...