Point of View

The novel is written from the third person omniscient point of view, albeit with a some-what limited perspective. To be specific, the narration focuses with almost complete exclusivity on the thoughts, feelings and motivations of its white characters. The black characters, who are admittedly secondary in narrative importance, receive little or no attention from the narration, their thoughts, feelings and motivations are, for the most part, not entered into. The most notable exception to this general rule is at the novel's close, at which point the narration explores the psyche of the killer, the black servant Moses. This approach to point of view has a definite resonance with one of the novel's key themes, the exploration of the relations between black and white. In short, the novel's focus on the white characters is a manifestation of the characters' limited awareness—they're fully aware of only...