Point of View

The True True Story of Raja the Gullible is told in the first person from Raja’s perspective, with an older Raja narrating events that span from his childhood in the 1960s through 2023. This point of view creates an intimate, confessional tone: the reader experiences both his current routines with his mother and his memories of war, desire, and humiliation filtered through his present understanding. Raja freely addresses the reader, anticipates objections, and comments on his own storytelling, which keeps us aware that this is not a neutral chronicle but a constructed account. His tendency to loop back, correct himself, and announce that he is avoiding certain details underlines the partial, selective nature of memory.

At the same time, the narrative voice is self-consciously unreliable in subtle ways. Raja calls himself gullible, dimwitted, and cowardly, framing his life as a series of mistakes, yet his...