Point of View

The Emperor of Gladness is written from the third-person point of view. At times, this third-person narrator assumes a more omniscient narrative stance. At other times, the narrator assumes a more intimate stance. For example, at the novel’s start, the narrator sets the narrative stage by describing all of East Gladness, Connecticut and the surrounding region: “Our town is raised up from a scab of land along a river in New England. When the prehistoric glaciers melted, the valley became a world-sized lake, and when that dried up it left a silvery trickle along the basin called the Connecticut” (1). The use of the first person plural pronoun “our” implies that the narrator is a member of the town, or holds a sweeping knowledge of the place the reader does not possess. The subsequent historical data indicates that the narrator is all-knowing and has a...