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Johnson narrates the story using the first-person point of view. Readers see all the characters and events through the narrator’s perspective. Readers have direct access to the narrator’s thoughts and feelings only. This point of view often leads to confusion and ambiguity, and readers must draw their own conclusions about characters’ thoughts and motivations as well as the significance of incidents. For example, readers must infer why Georgie cries while mopping the operating room. Georgie’s only response to the narrator’s questioning is “Jesus. Wow, oh boy, perfect.”
The narrator is unreliable since he tells the story in hindsight, many years after the events, and he was taking drugs at the time. He often provides scant details and is unsure about when events happened. His drug use causes him to hallucinate, so readers cannot always be sure what is real and what is not. The point of view gives a dreamlike, sometimes disorienting feel to the story. Johnson may have intended this effect to provide readers with some insight into the experience of living in a drug-induced escapist mental fog.
