Point of View

The Private Lives of Trees is written from a third person limited point of view. This means that the third person narrator’s access is limited to the protagonist Julián’s perception of the world. The way in which the narrator renders the narrative world on the page therefore is dictated by Julián’s consciousness. Because Julián is so preoccupied by his wife’s failure to return home “from her drawing class,” the narrator often finds herself incapable of transcending Julián’s circumstances in the immediate present (18). One such moment appears within the early pages of Part I, “Greenhouse.” While Julián is lying on his bed smoking a cigarette after putting his stepdaughter to sleep, the narrator struggles to move on with Julián’s story. “From here,” she says, “the story dissipates, and there is almost no way to...