Point of View

My Friends employs a shifting third-person perspective that blends close third-person narration with moments of broader omniscient insight, creating a mosaic of emotional viewpoints rather than a single dominant narrator. The story primarily follows different characters at different stages of their lives— Joar, Ted, Ali, and Kimkim as children, as well as Louisa—allowing the narrative to move fluidly across generations while retaining an intimate tone. Although the perspective is third person, the narration often slips deeply into a character’s interior world, adopting their emotional vocabulary, humor, fears, and assumptions. This produces a flexible form of limited omniscience: the narrator sees into characters’ thoughts and memories but does not offer perfect knowledge of every event, leaving certain emotional truths ambiguous or partial, just as the characters experience them.

The novel frequently shifts perspectives within a single chapter, particularly in the present-day sections, where the...