Point of View

Sharpe's Gold is written in the third person. The third person style enables the writer to show us the perspectives of multiple characters and give good descriptions of towns. However, a great deal of the book is from Captain Richard Sharpe's point of view. There is a lot of dialogue in the book that lets us understand the characters, their motives for doing things, and their manner of speaking. Descriptions alone would not be as effective because dialogue makes the events and the characters more alive to the reader and helps the book feel less like a historical narrative.

This novel would not be quite as effective written solely in the first person, from Sharpe's viewpoint, because the other characters give their opinions of Sharpe and events, which we would not get in the first person. For instance, Sergeant Patrick Harper says to Knowles at the...