What is the narrator point of view in the novel, Tin Man?

There are two meaningfully different narrative perspectives used in this novel, which are directly tied into the structure of the novel which is discussed below. For the first half of the novel—which encompasses a short chapter that focuses on Dora Judd in 1950, and then a nearly 100-page chapter that focuses on Ellis Judd in 1996—a third-person narrator is used. However, unlike many novels that are narrated in third-person, the direct lines of dialogue from different characters are not included within quotation marks. This creates a sort of dream-like effect that mirrors Ellis’ depression: for instance, many of the exact details of the scene where he “talks” to Annie at his house after getting home from work are not explicitly stated. Rather, there is the dream-like idea that Ellis is imagining having a conversation with Annie.

The second half of the novel, in the part entitled “Michael,” is not just written in the first-person, from Michael’s perspective: this text in the novel is understood to be the writing in a literal journal that Michael carries around with him from 1989-1990, a journal that Ellis discovers in the last scene of the chapter titled “1996.” Since the third-person narration in the first half of the novel was centered around Ellis’ thoughts and feelings—both as he navigated through life in 1996, and as he recalled different events from earlier in his life—the journal written by Michael provides meaningful counter-examples and additional information that Ellis was unable to provide himself. For instance, in Ellis’ portion of the novel, Michael’s early-nineties return to Oxford after living for a few years in London appears to be something of a jolly happenstance: “Three weeks later, Michael did come back to them [Ellis and Annie] as if he’d heard their lament across the sea. He walked in the same way he had walked out, with little explanation and that daft grin across his face” (74). After reading Michael’s perspective, however, we know that Michael took a significant amount of time to gather the courage to see his friends again, and effectively waited until he had completely and entirely overcome his intense grieving process after losing G before returning to Oxford.