Point of View

The point of view in The Old Drift varies among an omniscient plural first person narration, Percy’s singular first person narration, and a third person narration. The plural first person narrators are a swarm of mosquitos, although at the end of the novel, the narrators admit that they themselves do not know whether they are biological mosquitos or a swarm of Jacob’s Moskeetoze microdrones. At the end of each chapter, these narrators reflect on the events of the chapter. Percy is a British colonizer in the early 1900s whose singular first person narration makes up the bulk of the novel’s first chapter, “The Falls.”

The bulk of the novel is narrated in the third person. This third person perspective is omniscient, often describing the internal thoughts and feelings of the characters in the novel. However, this third person narration only follows the...