Point of View

Throughout the novel, Makkai utilizes the first-person perspective in order to foreground Bodie’s emotional and intellectual experience. Makkai narrates the story entirely from Bodie’s viewpoint; the reader thus forms an intimate relationship with Bodie’s desires, fears, opinions, and memories. Importantly, the first-person point of view allows the reader to track Bodie’s continuing investigation into the events around Thalia’s death. Bodie suspects, for much of the novel, that Denny Bloch murdered Thalia. At one point, she addresses Bloch and states, “Don’t get me wrong: I wanted your head on a pike” (296). By placing the reader within Bodie’s mind, Makkai encourages the reader to adopt Bodie's view of Thalia’s murder. However, at the end of the novel, Bodie realizes that it was instead Robbie Serenho who likely killed Thalia. She admits that she had been overly fixated on Bloch...