What is the narrator point of view in the novel, We Are Water?

The book’s narrative point of view shifts constantly, and in several different ways. First, chapters are voiced from the first-person perspectives of a variety of characters, with there being no regular pattern to the shifts between those characters. Primary narrators are protagonist Orion Oh; Orion’s ex-wife Annie; their son Andrew; and Annie’s cousin Kevin, the man who abused her as a child. There are also several points at which single chapters focus on the first-person voices of characters like Ariane and Marissa (Annie and Orion’s daughters) and Ruth Fletcher, a long-time resident of Three Rivers, the town where Annie grew up and in which she and Orion raised their family. Then, within each chapter, there are shifts between past-tense and present-tense, although it is important to note that shifts between tense do not always correspond with shifts in time. In other words, narrative of past events is often written in present-tense narration, seemingly to give a heightened, intensified sense of emotion and importance to events being described.

These shifts in narrative point of view are tied to the book’s central themes. For example, the shifting points of view (i.e. between members of Annie and Orion’s family) are a stylistic manifestation of the book’s overall thematic interest in family relationships: this is perhaps an explanation of why the narrative includes no narration from the point of view of Viveca, Annie’s bride-to-be. Also in this vein, the chapter narrated in the voice of Ruth Fletcher is focused on her own family’s experiences of events that are peripherally related to events in the lives of the Ohs. More significantly, the various shifts in time are primary structural manifestations of the book’s thematic interest in the relationship between past and present. A great many of the book’s chapters, as narrated from the perspectives of any of the characters, are defined by considerations of the past, and how they affected the present. It is only in the latter third-to-quarter of the book that narration focuses almost entirely on events in the present of the characters.

All this, in turn, leads to what seems to be the book’s main authorial perspective – that is, the core of what the author is telling the reader by telling the story in this way. As the novel draws to its conclusion, there is a clear sense that the explorations of all these troubled lives, troubled pasts, and often troubled presents are intended to offer the reader the idea that the past, no matter how painful, can be transcended; that the present is worth fully inhabiting; and the future can be faced with courage and optimism, even if the future is as potentially bleak as those of Orion and Andrew, the two deeply wounded men whose courage in facing upcoming uncertainties is at the core of the book’s closing images.