Point of View

The novel is told from the third-person, limited, point of view. The narrator is reliable, entirely effaced, and unnamed. Clarissa Oakes, Jack Aubrey, and Stephen Maturin, the main characters, are the protagonists and central figures in all the scenes in the novel. The narrator divulges some internal thoughts of the protagonists but not of other characters. The majority of the story is told through action and dialogue; revealed thoughts are infrequent and are used for characterization rather than plot development. Occasional personal letters allow for some first-person introspection without destroying the cadence of the overall narrative structure; these letters are from Aubrey to his wife Sophie or from Maturin to his wife Diana.

The third-person point of view allows the protagonists to be presented in a highly-sympathetic manner. For example, the narrative structure portrays Clarissa's amorality as explicable and even expected rather than perverse or immoral...