Point of View

Anthony Doerr tells his novel About Grace in the third-person, limited-omniscient perspective from the point of view of an unnamed, unidentified narrator. The narrator focuses primarily on revolving around David, the events in David’s life, and the content of his thoughts, musings, and dreams through the course of the novel. David thus emerges as the central figure in the story, around which all other characters orbit like a pattern in nature. The narrator, though capable of reading David’s mind and revealing his dreams, rarely ventures beyond David in the novel. (Quick asides to Naaliyah’s burying her father, for example, are exceptions rather than the rule.) This is to help create a sense of hope, despair, and anxiousness as the reader, like David, does not know what is true or not, and does not know what the future actually holds, or what is...