Point of View

Madeleine is Sleeping is written from the third person point-of-view. It primarily deals with Madeleine, but the omniscient narrator also shares the stories of Madeleine's friends, family and dream characters. Although the third-person narrator is omniscient, the narrator chooses not to share too much information with the reader. It is as if author Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum doesn't want to connect the dots for the reader, preferring that readers develop their own interpretation of events.

Forcing the reader to read discriminately is a goal well-suited to the author's experiment in hyperfiction. Since hyperfiction is organized similarly to how an internet search engine operates, reading Madeleine is Sleeping is a bit like researching a subject on-line. When searching for information on the internet, the searcher must carefully the interpret the results of their search, weeding out the hyperbole from the earnest factual information-just as the reader of Madeleine...