Point of View

All the stories are told from Jeremiah's point of view. As narrator, he colors the scenes with his subjective senses of comfort, terror, confusion, physical pain, and emotional suffering. This is a general characteristic of the first-person point of view, and without it, the stories would have lost literary value. Since the claimed author has been shown to be a hoax, the impact of the point of view has diminished because it was once believed that an actual human being had gone through what Jeremiah suffered. However, as time expands between the expose and fresh readership, the stories still stand as strong possibilities. Someone like Jeremiah probably exists but cannot tell the stories as well as a seasoned author, who claims she was also abused as a child. This is the inherent strength of first person narrative because it draws the reader directly into the narrator's...