What is the narrator point of view in the novel, We Were Liars?

The majority of this story is told from the first person point of view of Cadence Sinclair Eastman, the only survivor of a fire she and her friends started at Clairmont. As the novel tells Cadence’s journey to healing after the fire, it would not be as significant or suspenseful if it were not told by a character who did not remember the details of the fire. However, there are a few parts of the novel that are not told from the first person point of view. Chapter 80 is an exception as it is written in the third person point of view, almost as if it were a newspaper report. Cadence’s fairy tales are written from the perspective of an omniscient, third person narrator.

The story is told mostly through exposition with scattered dialogue as Cadence interacts with the characters around her. This emphasis on exposition keeps the story focused on Cadence’s journey to regain her memory of what happened during the novel. The focus is on what is going on in Cadence’s mind and the she is, or is not, interpreting the hints begin given to her about the night of the fire. After Cadence joins her family on the island during her seventeenth summer, the tense of the novel switches back and forth between the past and the present.