Point of View

Flashlight uses a close third person that attaches itself to a small circle of focal characters and lets their habits of attention shape what the reader can know. Scenes filtered through Louisa turn ordinary routes into instruments of safety. She reads rooms by light, sound, and posture, and the narration limits itself to those measurements, so that worry never arrives as abstract rumination but as a change in breath, a hand that tightens, a door that is left slightly open. When the focus shifts to Anne, the prose settles into domestic procedure and records fear as labor. Lists, errands, and small repairs take the place of speeches. The effect is to honor what care looks like from the inside and to deny the false clarity that hindsight can lend. Serk’s chapters carry the same discipline into harsher rooms. He names signals, trains his ear...