Point of View

The Point of View of The Rings of Saturn starts from the first person (that of the author and narrator WG Sebald), and delves into the third-person omniscient as the narrator observes the events of history in relation to the landscape. WG Sebald is an unapologetically unreliable narrator, in the sense that this is book can be described both as a Subjectivist and a Post-Modern piece of work. This means that all of the events that happen through the course of the narrative are filtered through WG Sebald's own perception and psychology, and, where he is talking about a historical event he freely speculates about the supposed feelings and events that might have happened or might have been observed.

This shifting Point of View firmly places the reader into Sebald's interior landscape, especially as we understand that, for the post modernist, the interior memories, impressions and...