Point of View

Murugan tells One Part Woman through a third person free indirect point of view. While the narration lives primarily behind Kali's consciousness for the majority of the novel's former half, the latter half cracks this pattern, allowing Ponna's perspective to penetrate and punctuate Kali's. By granting Ponna a share of the narrative point of view, the author is able to further explore the theme embodied in the novel's title. Though many of Kali's thoughts involve Ponna, she exists largely in the periphery of the narrative during its first half. Once Ponna goes to the eighteenth day of the festival, moving outside Kali's physical proximity, the narrative begins to alternate between her perspective and Kali's. This stylistic choice creates a structural representation of the widening divide between Kali and Ponna.

In Chapters 1 - 15, while the narrator remains close to Kali's psyche, the story lives in an...