Point of View

The Chamber is written in the third person point of view. The author, John Grisham, writes about the characters with some discussion among them. The novel is purely fictional, so the author has no motives beyond storytelling. Grisham does mention in the acknowledgments section that he was once a lawyer, although he was never required to visit death row or assist a client detained there, and that he struggles with the "moral complexities" of the death penalty.

Setting

The first three chapters of The Chamber are set in the late 1960s. At that time in Mississippi, the fight for civil rights was well under way. The Ku Klux Klan was terrorizing blacks and their sympathizers. Sam Cayhall lived in a small town called Clanton, but traveled to Greenville to assist in a Klan organized bombing of Marvin Kramer's law office. The era is described as tumultuous...