Point of View

The majority of this story is told by Frances, a first-person narrator. Frances is a biased narrator not only because she tells her story from her point of view, but also because she is dying of a disease that is impacting her memory. She says of her disease: “it has taken any memory of last week as well as the names and titles I was told an hour ago, but it is kind enough to leave the summer of 1969 intact” (4). Even though Frances cannot remember the correct term for the vicar who comes to see her or the titles of the people in the jail who care for her, she claims that her memory of the summer that Cara and Peter died is intact.

While Frances’ memory of her time at Lyntons might be faulty, Frances is the ideal person to narrate the story. The...