Point of View

In All’s Well, Mona Awad limits the narrative point of view to Miranda’s first-person perspective for the whole novel. All the other characters, real, remembered, or imagined are presented and described to the reader through Miranda’s consciousness, addled as it is by prescription drugs and the constant pain she struggles to relieve. Because she operates on a steady diet of toxic chemicals like nicotine, alcohol and benzodiazepine tranquilizers, Miranda’s judgment of the other characters’ virtue, personality or motivation must be considered impaired, just as the same chemical mix would do the same to one’s ability to drive a car safely. It is the self-admitted fact of Miranda’s pill popping, and the subsequent haze through which she perceives the increasingly bizarre events unfolding before her that mark Miranda as a particularly unreliable narrator.

Awad depicts so much of the story...