Point of View

Days Without End is told through the first-person narrative perspective of Thomas McNulty. As a frame narrative, Thomas recounts the story of his life through a series of reflections about his childhood, his journey to America, and his army years during the Indian Wars and the Civil War. In many ways, it is an autobiographical coming-of-age story that extends into Thomas’s adulthood, and which aims to show how he grows, changes, and matures through his life experiences.

With Thomas’s power of hindsight, the novel employs a self-consciousness narrative technique when he says, “I am doing that now as I write these words in Tennessee” (46). Although it is unclear how old Thomas is when he narrates the story, he seems nostalgic about the past, particularly when he says “I am thinking of the days without end of my life. And it is not like...