Point of View

The novel is told entirely in the first person from Jesse’s perspective. The novel uses the technique of the unreliable narrator to reveal different facets of Jesse’s personality. Although all of the information we get about the story is filtered through Jesse, the author uses various techniques to show that Jesse’s narration isn’t entirely honest. A key example of this is when Jesse described what happened when he came home to find his dad drunk and asleep on the couch. Jesse insisted in the narration that he woke his dad and made him go to bed because he didn’t want to have to see him when he got up in the morning. But the act of making sure his dad went to sleep on a real bed, combined with the chapter in which Jesse went to watch him play without...