Universal Harvester

What is the narrator point of view in the novel, Universal Harvester?

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The point of view from which this story is told alternates between characters as the story jumps between locations and points in time. In the first section of the novel, the narrator describes Jeremy and his point of view, followed by a bit of Sarah Jane's life and perspective. There is a voice underneath it all that feels very sinister and knowing, at first. There is this constant acknowledgement of all of the different ways the story could have developed, but did not, for perhaps arbitrary reasons, or perhaps inevitable curiosity or fatal character traits being pursued, particularly after the tapes in the Video Hut come to light.

The second Part is told from the omniscient narrator about Lisa's family history. It is not until the end of the novel that it is revealed that Part II is actually narrated by Lisa. The experiences descried in Part II are returned to briefly toward the end of the fourth part, in which Lisa explains what happened after her mother's disappearance: the moving around the country, the inability to find a firm foundation on which she could grow up, her father's obsession with tracking down Michael Christopher's church and finally bringing her mother home. Lisa's comments on the resiliency of children but the impossibility of them returning to how they once were, pre-trauma, takes on a new darkness as she records her own ruptured childhood.

Part III returns to following Jeremy's storyline, starting with Ezra's accident and leading up to his interrogation by Lisa. Readers are unable to directly witness, through what Lisa is able to recount in her narration throughout earlier sections of the novel, her conversation with Jeremy (an interrogation on one of her tapes, which she apparently later splices onto yet more movie video tapes in Video Hut), although the reader does get a few snippets when the footage of this interrogation is recounted by the Pratts.

Part IV is the most confusing in terms of its narration. It is straightforward in the sense that it follows the Pratt family, dipping in and out of the minds of each family member, and it shows their exploration of and interaction with their new Iowa setting. However, it is unclear how much of this chapter is meant to be narrated by Lisa, and how much is an objective omniscient narrator. How would Lisa know the finer points of the Pratt family dynamic and their thoughts at any given moment? Yet the narration segues into her voice at the end, beginning to use personal pronouns like 'my' in places that make it unambiguous that Lisa has taken over. This fusion creates an interesting blend: the Pratts, who are perplexed and disturbed at the tapes, and struggling for answers about who Lisa is, and Lisa herself effortlessly narrating their lives for them, when the only interaction the reader sees between them is her waving from her window to them as they pull in and immediately out of her driveway in their RV.

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