Point of View

This novel is told with first-person limited omniscience narration from the point of view of an unnamed, teenage male narrator who gradually comes of age into manhood throughout the novel. This first person point-of-view is integral to the novel since the entire text surrounds this narrator's struggle to form his own self-identity, questioning whether he is mostly French or mostly Russian. This intimate look into the narrator's thoughts and fears throughout this process of self-discovery provides the majority of the tension in the novel. This point-of-view also allows for Charlotte, the grandmother, to be cast in a mysterious, almost magical light, because the reader only meets Charlotte through the narrator's child-like memories of her.

Even though the unnamed narrator is the point-of-view character in the novel, the point-of-view sometimes shifts during Charlotte's stories and the reader leaves the narrator's head and seems to float above historical...