Point of View

The novel is narrated from thirteen different perspectives, excluding Loother and Lony’s brief appearance in their own segment. Each narrator speaks with a different voice, often with a different narratorial perspective, diction, and structure. Since many different narrators recount the same events and memories from different perspectives, the reader need not worry about unreliability: the characters tend to demonstrate consistent sequences of events, even if they interpret differently.

The Prologue and Interlude narrator speaks in an unusual voice, using the first-person-plural: “we.” This voice seems to speak for all people with any Native identity as a communal group with shared history, needs, and struggles. It is a nonfiction voice that also occasionally addresses the reader or a figurative white reader in the second person, “you.”

Some characters are internally inconsistent in their narrative perspectives. Tony Loneman narrates in the first-person in Part One, where...