Third Person Limited Point of View
The coming-of-age story of Eilis Lacey is ironically not told from her point of view. The narrator speaks in third person limited. The narrator knows all of Eilis’s feelings and perceptions but does not know the other characters’ feelings and perceptions. Other characters besides Eilis are rather presented externally.
This is significant because the narrator has more liberty to really show Eilis’s character changing throughout her journey because we witness her changing thoughts and actions towards different situations and other people around her. We see the transformation of Eilis because we are granted the insight of how her changed attitudes and actions affect those surrounding her. Gaining insight on Eilis’s character shows the audience a side of Eilis that is true and raw and vulnerable.
The narrator does a great job of telling the story in a way that almost seems third person omniscient. Don’t be fooled! The narrator knows only Eilis’s feelings but because Eilis is such an insightful person and has a heightened sense of awareness, she does a lot of analyzations of how other characters react and feel about her actions. We see her thought process because the narrator knows her thoughts. Confusing right? It’s like Inception…. but point of view inception.
What is important is that the reader is not only confined to Eilis’s judgement because the reader catches a firsthand glimpse of the other characters’ reactions and quotes from the third person narrator. For example, we know that Tony is crazy about Eilis not only because she thinks he is crazy about her, but also because we see his actual actions toward her that clearly depict that he loves her. The third person limited perspective allows the reader to make conclusions about characters and situations that are not completely skewed by Eilis’s judgement.
But I know what you are thinking… Who even is this narrator? I guess we may never know. But it’s particularly interesting that Colm Toibin, the male author, has written a coming-of-age story about a woman. He manages to share her transition to adulthood in a beautiful and effortless way.
BROOKLYN 