Point of View

Vineland is written in the third-person, narrated by an omniscient narrator. It assumes the point of view of nearly all of the characters in turn, filtering the main events of the story through their eyes and examining their own thoughts and motivations.

The points of view assumed by Pynchon also change with the time setting. Several of the characters are depicted in 1970 as well as 1984 and the changes they have undergone in the meantime are evident in the differences in their points of view as they examine their earlier lives from fourteen years' distance. Other characters, such as the young Prairie and her friends, are looking more toward the future in anticipation.

Pynchon's rapid changing of time and place makes a coherent narrative point of view difficult to discern in Vineland, but there are some common threads woven through the story. The novel addresses the change...