Point of View

The point of view in the novel While I Was Gone comes from the perspective of the first person narrator, Jo Becker. Though Jo tells the story entirely from a vantage point well after all of the action in the novel, she does so in such a way to keep readers engaged in the moment. From the opening of the novel, through her flashbacks to her time at the group house on Lyman Street in Cambridge, through her resolution of the marital disaster she created, she creates tension and keeps the reader wondering how she will get past seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Though Jo as narrator gives a great deal of description of her thoughts, she never explicitly says whether or not she learned a lesson, and in this way her narration consists of more showing than telling.

The tone of narration in the early part of...