Point of View

The novel is narrated by a non-exegetic, third-person omniscient narrator. The narrator has access to distant history as well as events in the characters’ pasts and the thoughts of all of the principal characters. Thus for any event that happens before the end of the novel, the narrator can interject about the distant past or about the future: “Later, he would look back at the unraveling and see that this instant was the point of departure” (13). In only one line does the narrator seem to transgress the temporal boundary of the novel’s end, when Fern is flying home: “above the wooded lanes … where Mary and Hugh would return over Christmas, the whole landscape transformed by a heavy snowfall, where they would drink hot toddies and let go, for the last time, of the idea of the son they had meant to have” (302). The narrator...