Point of View

The author writes This Tender Land from Odie O'Banion's first person point of view. While Odie is telling the story of his life as a 12-year-old boy in 1932, he narrates from an unidentified moment in the future. Often Odie's vantage lends a widened and wizened perspective on the events he experienced with his friends during the Depression. In this way, the narrative holds Odie's youthful and elderly consciousness at once, a double-I effect that nuances and expands the narrative's thematic interests and subtextual explorations. Because Odie has lived many years beyond the immediate events of the page, he is able to reflect upon his decisions and feelings as a young man, to contemplate how these significant experiences have shaped his sense of self over the course of his entire life.

Because Odie is telling this story as an older man, the reader understands that the...