Point of View

The Repeat Room is written from both the first-person and third- person points of view. The first half of the novel is written from the third-person, limited perspective. The third-person narrator inhabits the primary character Abel Cotter’s consciousness. Because of the narrator’s close psychic access to Abel, she renders the narrative world according to how Abel sees and experiences it. The reader can refer to a passage within the shower scene in order to understand this formal dynamic. After the shower, the narrator says that Abel’s “sallow, ill-treated neck rose from the hemmed neck hole to where his head rode in the air above his shoulders, its weight settling always implacably down. Like a puppet when one looks at it, he was for that moment more real than the things around him. Equally laughably obvious: he couldn’t be the center of...