Point of View

An anonymous first-person narrator tells the story of her college years, which is the story of the novel, save for the interspersed third-person crocodile scenes. At the end of the novel, another first-person character, Derek Jarman, voices these crocodile scenes as he films the crocodile. The tense primarily remains in the past throughout the novel, complementing the content as a story of her college memories; however, the narrator shifts to the present when commenting about certain memories in hindsight.

The shift to the third-person crocodile scenes helps to create the atmosphere for magical realism. The crocodile, an animal, acts sentient and articulate, as it would in a fable, in which animals are main characters who typically communicate a moral. The literary tradition of magical realism copies and pastes such characters into realistic settings, as the author does here. It also veils socioeconomic and political criticism...