Point of View

Dabos writes A Winter’s Promise in the third person point of view that is mostly limited to Ophelia’s perspective. The narration is written in the past tense. The narrator appears omniscient at times when they refer to the larger framing story in “Fragment” and “Fragment, postscript” at the beginning and end of the novel. Dabos writes, “In the beginning, we were as one. But God felt we couldn’t satisfy him like that, so God set about dividing us” (11). At this point, Ophelia does not yet exist, not would she be aware of God’s feelings. Dabos suggests, instead, that the narrator has either a sense of omniscience or is limiting its perspective to another, unnamed character who has recorded the events of the prologue and epilogue.

The sense of omniscience is also echoed in the beginning of the first chapter, “The Archivist...