Point of View

Either/Or is told from first-person perspective, from Selin’s point of view. Selin is an amusing narrator. Her commentary is both poignant and relatable. Selin is sometimes a harsh judge of mankind, and often feels herself superior to her peers.

Selin is not exempt from her own criticism, however. At the very start of the novel, she is ashamed of inwardly comparing returning to school to someone returning from a gulag: “I immediately recognized how shameful, self-important, and obtuse it was for me, an American college student who hadn’t checked email for three months, to compare herself to a political prisoner who had spent seven years in a gulag. But it was too late—I had already thought of it” (9). Selin is clearly aware of her self-absorption but cannot help herself from indulging in self-pity. Indeed, she spends the first half of the...