Point of View

The novel is written from the third person point of view. This third person narrator is limited to the main character Isabel den Brave’s perspective. This means that the way the narrator depicts the narrative world throughout the novel is inspired by the way that Isabel sees, experiences, and processes it. The author establishes this close relationship between Isabel and the third person narrator at the outset of Part I, Chapter 1. When Isabel finds the “broken piece of ceramic under the roots of a dead gourd” while out in the garden, she is immediately convinced that the broken plate must have some deeper meaning (3). The way that she responds to this seemingly innocuous discovery captures Isabel’s close relationship with the house and its furnishings. Therefore, the narrator is not attributing this value to the piece of ceramic, but is rather rendering the object...