Point of View

In the first four chapters of When We Cease to Understand the World, Labatut employs various forms of the third-person perspective before adopting, in the final chapter, the first-person point of view. Through this fluidity in perspective, Labatut further challenges conventions of historical narration. In the novel’s opening chapter, “Prussian Blue,” Labatut’s point of view resembles that of a fairly typical historian. Here, he utilizes the third-person objective in order to firmly place Fritz Haber, Carl Wilhelm Scheele, and Alan Turing (among others) in the realm of objective history. This perspective creates a strong sense of distance, in which the reader cannot enter the minds of these scientists. Over the course of the next three chapters, however, Labatut abandons the quasi-objectivity of this point of view in favor of a more omniscient, though still limited, perspective. The reader, in these chapters, is privy...