Point of View

The novel is written, for the most part, from the first person past tense point of view of narrator and protagonist Miles Halter. The events of the story are recounted from his intellectual, philosophical and experiential perspective, drawing the reader into his subjective experiences of school, love, and death. The primary value of this perspective is that engages the reader thoroughly with Miles' story, and arguably quite personally, since virtually all of his experiences, it could be argued, have been experienced by the reader in one way or another. There are a couple of exceptions to this overall point of view, not in terms of whose point of view the narration comes from but in how it's expressed. To be specific, there are a couple of occasions in which Miles' narration shifts into present tense, these occasions occurring (interestingly enough) in the second half of the...