Point of View

The Known World is narrated in the third person, past tense by someone who appears not to be related to any of the characters, but is privy to their innermost thoughts. The narrator, whose motivations for telling the story are never revealed, also appears to possess historical records thought to have been destroyed in a fire, in a desire to explain life and society before the Civil War, and in particular examine the oddity of blacks owning blacks. There is a curious intensity to the narration, however, and the narrator often jumps forward to tell how fate will deal with some minor character, or back to why or how some situation came to pass. The choppy narration is clearly intentional, meant to heighten the sense that the narrator is urgent and earnest about the way things were in rural Virginia before the Civil War, that the...