Point of View

The point of view of the novel is constantly changing. The novel is broken up into 51 different chapters, and they are almost all titled with a name that designates the central character for the chapter. Alice Bradford, Eleanor Billington, John Billington, and Newcomen are the most frequent central characters. However, Dorothy also has a few chapters in Part Two. The women all narrate in the first-person, though they all oscillate between the past and the present tense. The men remain consistently in third-person past. In addition to this, there are two seemingly omniscient chapters titled “Meanwhile” and “Nature.” Both chapters are presented in the present tense and have no central character. Near the end of the novel, a page from the Diary of John Winthrop, who is not directly involved in the story, is presented as a chapter of its own.

At first, a reader...