Point of View

Austin Wright tells his novel Tony & Susan in the third-person limited-omniscient narrative mode. This is done for a few different reasons. The novel essentially deals with a woman reading a novel, and the events of that novel and how they affect the life of the woman within the novel she has been written into. The third-person narrator, in both meta-novel and inter-novel, provide a sense of continuity and a reliable narrator as the meta-novel weaves back and forth between Susan and Nocturnal Animals. The third person allows the reader to be an observer of everything going on, both in Susan’s world and in Nocturnal Animals, just the way that Susan is an observer of everything going on in Nocturnal Animals. The narrator is limited in terms of his or her omniscience, and does not know everything. The narrator only reveals things as the plot...