Point of View

Most of this novel is told from the point of view of a third-person narrator. There is not a particular character of focus. Instead, the narrator bounces around from character to character as he is telling the story. The narrator knows the thoughts, feelings, and emotions of all the characters. The narrator tells the stories of Samuel, Anita, Marisol, and Leticia fairly and completely. The narrator is biased in that he suggests that the atrocities, such as Kristallnacht and the El Mozote massacre, were necessary. For instance, he says of El Mozote that the military leaders “fulfilled their mission of scaring the locals into submission by annihilating more than eight hundred people, half of them children, with an average age of six” (56).

There are five portions of the novel that are narrated from the first-person point of view of Anita. Consider Anita’s opening line...