Point of View

The novel is written from Elizabeth's first person point of view. At the start of the text, Elizabeth says: "I'm inconsistent, get distracted" (13). Though she is identifying these character traits, as the source of her unsatisfactory teaching abilities, these admittedly avoidant tendencies illuminate her narrative impulses. Her obsessive running regimen, her constant wanderings around the city, and her inability to stay at work disrupt her ability to form a linear narration of her life. Each scene she describes or memory she recounts, ends abruptly, syncopated by her movements from one preoccupation to the next. Despite her perpetual state of motion, Elizabeth's narrative voice is predictably compulsive. Many passages, especially towards the start of the novel, employ anaphora, or the repetition of the same phrasal structure at the start of each sentence. Many of these sentences are "I" driven, a testament to the first person vantage...