Point of View

While it seems that the novel is told from a third-person omniscient point of view, the author focuses on Jack’s perspective; the text always describes Jack’s thoughts as well as the general scene. As the title character, Jack’s experience within the novel is most significant, and the author employs it to highlight her most important themes. Consequently, the reader emotionally invests with Jack and his plight. His point of view is not at all reliable, as he is often too drunk to know whether certain events really happened. The episode with Bradshaw exemplifies this, when Jack is so drunk that he questions whether he really saw Bradshaw, and has to check that he did receive his money to believe that that experience was real. Jack is also full of self-doubt and lives almost entirely in his own imagination, which leads the reader...