Point of View

Like Tyll’s balancing act, point of view is jarring and unnerving but enthralling, even engaging. The narrative is told through multiple points of view, a different voice dominating each of the narrative’s eight episodes. Indeed, critical narrative events—Claus’s execution, for instance, and the death of Friedrich from the plague--are presented from different perspectives in different episodes. Not surprising, given the narrative focus on the anarchic antics of an itinerant jester and juggler who delights in surprise and shock, the experiment in point of view in Tyll is unconventional, jarring, and disruptive. The first episode, for instance, is related by a choral We, a town that is first entertained by Tyll’s traveling troupe and then summarily destroyed by roaming soldiers. Indeed, in the last section of the episode, We speak from the grave, an eerie effect that captures the waste and...