Point of View

The majority of the story is told mainly from the first-person perspective of the main unnamed narrator's point of view who begins with a vignette about a formative moment in her childhood. Sometimes this narrator is omniscient, sometimes she is simply an observer. On occasion, the author switches to the first-person perspective of another character in a vignette, but these characters are all people the main narrator has "collected," even if they are from a different point in history, which is the purpose of her pilgrimage. The point of view always returns to the main narrator, the alter-ego of the writer. She even writes about her own writing. She describes picking the characters from her observations of people, in "Cabinet of Curiosities: " Sometimes a figure carves itself out of the crowd, and then I deviate from my itinerary to follow it for a moment, start...