Blood Music | Literary Qualities

Blood Music Literary Qualities

"Blood Music" is structured as the reminiscences of one narrator, which allows him to foreshadow events he has alredy experienced and to shift back and forth through time as it suits him. Nonetheless, he is a limited narrator. He cannot read thoughts, nor can he definitively know events he did not witness; he can only speculate, offer opinion instead of fact, and rely on hearsay for much of his narrative.

Given the subject matter of "Blood Music," full of science and technological hardware, the reminiscence structure offers a humanizing tone, one that scales down the lofty idea of MABs healing people in its grandest sense to its effects on individual people. This turns the arcane subject matter into something that can be seen as affecting ordinary people, making complicated concepts and mind-boggling situations accessible to an audience of nonscientists.