Point of View

The novel is written in the third person and the past tense, and the narrator is omniscient. However, the narrator inhabits one character’s perspective at any given time. In Chapter 1.0, the narrator inhabits the perspectives of various members of Ferguson’s family, but mainly his mother and father. From Chapter 1.1 until the end of the book, the narration then inhabits solely Ferguson’s perspective while still remaining solely in the third person. Chapter 1.0 therefore functions as a prelude to the rest of the novel in that it helps to establish the points of view of the older characters that have influence in Ferguson’s life via importance and proximity. The subsequent fidelity to Ferguson’s perspective then serves the novel’s goal of exploring Ferguson’s divergences in the timelines in both emotional and material terms.

The novel then functions as a means of...