More Than Human Narrator:

First Person (Central Narrator); Third Person Limited Omniscient; Third Person Objective

The narrative technique in this book is quite tricky. But it all boils down to either 1) first person central narrator, 2) third person limited, 3) third person objective, or 4) moving between third person limited and third person objective. Okay, ready? Here we go.

First Person Central Narrator

The first person passages are easy to spot—they have the word "I" everywhere. Part 2, for example, is basically from Gerry's first person point of view as he discusses his memories with Stern the psychotherapist.

Just be careful: Gerry has that wacky telepathic probing power. When he remembers Miss Kew's memories, those are described in the first person from Miss Kew's point of view, even though they're still happening in Gerry's head. He probed her mind in her library and took the contents of her memories about Lone into his mind and is perceiving them from her point of view. Kind of like Being John Malkovich.

The central part of central narrator just means the "I" is the star of the show, not some guy on the sidelines like Nick Carroway in The Great Gatsby. That would be a peripheral narrator.

Third Person Limited

The third person passages are mostly limited omniscient ones, meaning they stick to the point of view of a particular character, such as Hip or Evelyn, and let us into that particular character's thoughts or feelings. These passages are straightforward, along the lines of: She pressed the button. She couldn't believe the machine poured out a million dollars. She pressed the button again.

Let's look at a real example from the book. This one is talking about Hip:

His bit of tubing caught his eye and he picked it up and he sat down in the big chair. It drove the embarrassing moment away; brought back the greater urgency. He had to see Janie. [...] it was probably hopeless [...] He lay back. (3.8.28)

We get some action from his point of view, that he picks up the tubing and sits down, and then we get his internal thoughts about seeing Janie but deciding to wait, and then some more of his action: he lies down. In this case, it's so straightforward that it forms a pattern: stimulus, thought, response.

Third Person Objective

This is the bird's eye point of view that sees everything except the internal lives of the characters. These passages are usually pretty short, a paragraph or two, but not always. Examples include the description of Lone healing during his first week at the Prodd's (1.9.11) and the description of the wordless communication of babies (1.1.11). The third person objective technique allows Sturgeon to describe something, such as time passing, without worrying what any one particular character thinks or feels about it—that'd get pretty tiring.

For example, consider this paragraph that transitions from Lone being lonely in the woods to Janie being lonely in her woods:

It was too late even for the copse's nocturnal habitants. It was cold at the hidden foot of the dwarf oak and as dark as the chambers of a dead man's heart. (1.21.19)

Those certainly aren't Janie's thoughts, since she's around five years old at this time and probably wouldn't be thinking in such complex metaphors, so third person objective it is.

Moving Between Third Person Limited and Third Person Objective

Another way to look at the third person sections of this novel are to consider the narrator's perspective as a camera on a boom. The camera can move closer to the character and pick up some of the character's thoughts (which would be the third person limited) or it can stretch farther away and see through the character's own eyes (the third person objective).

Consider the beginning of Part 3, for example. It's from Janie's point of view, yet we know her eye color: "She had gray-green eyes" (3.1.2).

A few paragraphs later, we get a big transition paragraph describing both the sheriff and Janie walking through the jailhouse. The camera, so to speak, has zoomed out to let us see both from a distance:

The walls were steel plates like a ship's bulkhead, studded with rivets, painted a faded cream above and mustard color below. Their footsteps echoed [...] They stepped through [...] they came into a barnlike area, concrete on walls and ceiling. Built around it was a sort of balcony; under and over this were the cells, steel walled, fronted by close-set bars. (3.1.21)

(Yeah, that's a pretty long description of a jailhouse, and we even shortened it. But it was 1953 and The Shawshank Redemption hadn't come out in movie theaters yet, so maybe many readers weren't as familiar with what jails looked like.)

So we've gone from Janie's point of view, but objective enough to see her eye color, to an even further zoom-out transition paragraph to see the whole jail setting. We're switching narrative techniques faster than Lady Gaga changes her hairstyle.

And we don't stop there. Next, we zoom all the way in to third person limited to get ahold of some of Janie's internal decision-making process: "She waited and when he had nothing else to offer, she turned and called the sheriff" (3.1.49).

So the third person camera moves all around the stage, sometimes far away enough to see the whole shebang, and sometimes close enough in to pick up the focal character's thoughts or feelings.

What Does It All Mean?

Why can't Sturgeon just hold the camera straight on one character? Shaky hands? Short attention span?

The answer? None of the above. The tricky narrative technique expresses the fragmented yet unified nature of the gestalt life form.

Remember, the gestalt is made up of distinct individuals working together; they all have separate bodies. Just think of when Janie hides from Gerry for most of Part 3. She hides because the two have different points of view on what the gestalt should be. People don't have to see things the same way to belong to the same society or, in this book, the same life form.

The narrative technique in this novel does get a little confusing. Maybe that's part of the reason Stephen King compared Theodore Sturgeon to William Faulkner. In the literary world, that's quite the compliment.