Point of View

What Strange Paradise is written from the third person point of view, altering between present and past tense from chapter to chapter. The third person perspective is effective at psychologically connecting all of the disparate characters in the story, and frees the narrator to make sweeping political and moral statements succinctly. “Perhaps it was not the presence of a revolutionary at a revolution that so enraged the secret police who took them, but the presence of an ordinary man” (88). Throughout the novel, the narrator alternates between closely inhabiting one character’s perspective and zooming out to make statements about the nature of the refugee crisis. Because the narrator often inhabits two very different characters back to back, or because the storylines are changing from chapter to chapter, the audience has the opportunity to explore opposing viewpoints side by side. The narration itself is a moral...