Point of View

The Seventh Cross uses a third-person point of view, but first-person points of view regularly intrude. Sometimes this shift is signposted – as when Overkamp reads out what he has written, or Fuellgrabe’s evidence is presented verbatim – but more often, characters’ voices blend in with the narrator’s. This can have a dramatic effect, for instance when the novel articulates the sentiments of the “dead” Wallau, making him eloquent despite his stubborn silence (168). It also provides insight into a range of different perspectives, with an alternately omniscient and limited narrator whose scope extends well beyond the protagonist.

In the most notable example of narrative experimentation, an unnamed prisoner opens and closes the narrative, employing a first-person plural point of view which serves to engage the reader. This prologue and epilogue are not demarcated as such, so there is no hard distinction between the speaker and...