Point of View

An engaging technical elements of the narrative is its shift between different points of view. Written in the third person, past tense, the perspective shifts back and forth between the various characters at various times. In the early chapters, the story is told almost entirely from Mattie’s point of view. Then, for about a page and a half in Chapter 4 (the section in which Lisbeth is suffering from a fever and dehydration), the narrative is written from the perspective of a one-year-old. The shift isn't complete because a child that age does not have the vocabulary, sense of sentence structure, or skill to communicate in the way the author has represented. But, the author does manage to communicate the limited, purely emotional, barely articulate experiences and sensations of that one-year-old, to the point where the reader gets a glimmer of understanding of what it...