Point of View

Emily Bleeker tells her novel “Wreckage” in the third and first-person limited omniscient narrative modes, alternating between first and third-person based on the chapter and the circumstances. Interview chapters between Lillian and Genevieve, and Dave and Genevieve, occur in the past-tense in third-person as though the reader is a viewer watching events unfold, or a viewer watching the aired interview. Chapters detailing the time spent on the island are told in present-tense from the first-person perspective of either Lillian or Dave depending on the chapter, giving the reader a firsthand account and glimpse of life on the island. This also underscores the point that Dave and Lillian are alone on the island without viewers or readers, and so the reader must access their minds to understand what they went through. The limited-omniscient aspect of the narrative not only adds a sense of realism because Dave...