Point of View

The novel is written from the third person limited point of view. This means that the third person narrator’s access is limited to the protagonist's, Sammie, thoughts and feelings. The body of the narration is thus filtered through Sammie’s psyche. The narrator’s descriptions of the narrative world, of Sammie’s body, her interactions, and her interpersonal conflicts all originate from Sammie’s mode of seeing and processing the world. This third person limited narration effectively enacts Sammie’s perpetual detachment from herself, and thus her ongoing crisis of identity.

Although Sammie’s life is nominally stable, she feels severed between divergent and contradictory versions of self throughout the novel. In Chapter 14, the narrator describes this experience saying, “She was so tired of feeling like a body split in half. Sometimes feeling like a mother, with the body of a mother doing all...