Point of View

The novel is written from a third person limited point of view. This means that throughout the novel, the third person narrator is situated within the main character Ingrid Yang’s consciousness. The ways in which the narrator describes, presents, and comments upon the narrative world, its characters and conflicts, is thus inextricable from Ingrid’s thoughts and feelings. The author introduces this intimate relationship between the narrator’s and Ingrid’s consciousnesses within the first paragraphs of Chapter 1, “The Curious Note”: “Sometimes she imagined, hopefully, that she was developing ulcers. No one could fault her for failing her dissertation because of stomach ulcers, could they? Pneumonia, then? What about mono? But how to contract these illnesses was another question entirely” (3). The narrator is not hoping that Ingrid will fall ill. Yet she presents these lines in this manner, because she is adopting Ingrid’s...