Point of View

The Ginger Man has a complex point of view. Although the novel takes place primarily from the point of view of the main character, Sebastian Dangerfield, it moves almost seamlessly from a first person perspective to a third person semi-omniscient narrator. Occasionally, the narration pulls back outside of Dangerfield's perspective, showing how other people view Dangerfield, as when he and O'Keefe are at the pub before O'Keefe departs for America. The transition between first and third sentence is accomplished with sentence fragments, which lack a "he" or an "I," and so exist neither in third person nor first person. These sentences join together passages that refer to Dangerfield in first and third person. The reader experiences a flowing point of view, moving closer inside Dangerfield's mind and then drifting further away to see the world from an outside point of view.

The storytelling style is stream...