Point of View

The novel is written from a range of first person and third person points of view. Book 1, “Washington Square,” is written from a third person limited perspective. This means that the third person narrator has sole access to the protagonist David Bingham’s point of view. The narrator therefore adopts David’s viewpoints and modes of processing when rendering the narrative world. For example, in Part 2, after David learns he will inherit the Washington Square house, the narrator says that “he had never considered the house as anything but a sanctuary . . . And now it would be his, and he its, and for the first time, the house felt oppressive, a place that he might now not ever escape, a place that possessed him as much as he did it” (13, 14). In this passage, the narrator assumes David’s perspective as she describes the house. She notes...