Point of View

The stories in All Aunt Hagar's Children are primarily narrated from a third person perspective, though there is one foray into first person in the titular story, "All Aunt Hagar's Children." Jones often works with complex or mosaic casts of characters, and the employment of a flexible third person perspective allows him to move through these characters' viewpoints and ideologies without needing to interrupt his narrative. However, there are occasional times where the third person perspective feels more distant and omniscient as opposed to shifting from one character's perspective to another, and in these cases Jones typically employs this strategy in order to create a sense of collective narrative.

"All Aunt Hagar's Children," the only first-person perspective in the collection, employs this because the sense of doubt and unreliability baked into a first-person style of narration is well-suited to the story's plot (which is, nominally...