Who is the narrator, can she or he read minds, and, more importantly, can we trust her or him?
Third Person (Omniscient)
The narrator of Rainbows End is omniscient, but sometimes takes a "limited omniscient" view. That is, the narrator can swoop into any character's mind in a scene or even tell part of the story from a bird's-eye view. But sometimes, the narrator takes up a position over the shoulder of a particular person for a particular scene. When that happens, we only see/know what that character knows. That limits our view, but it also probably brings us closer to what that particular character is going through.
Let's look at some examples.
The Omniscient, Bird's Eye View
At the beginning of Chapter 28, when Alfred Vaz and his colleagues have cancelled Credit Suisse in an attempt to destroy Rabbit, the narrator gives us a bird's-eye view summary of what happens:
The failures spread as timeouts on certificates from intermediate CAs and—where time-critical trust was involved—as direct notifications. In Europe, airplanes and trains came smoothly to a stop, without a single accident or fatality. A billion failures were noted, and emergency services moved—with varying success—into action. (28.3)
That's just one paragraph of a long section detailing what happens when a "certificate authority" (CA) stops working. None of our main characters is really watching this happen, so we're not getting the info through them. In fact, no one person anywhere is watching those "billion failures." So this bird's-eye, non-character omniscient is great for setting the scene or telling us about the exciting world of the 2020s.
Free Indirect Discourse: Looking Over Characters' Shoulders
Check out Chapter 6, when Robert recites some poetry to Chumlig's composition class. In the first section, we see the composition class from Robert's POV, so we get to hear about: how the old folks there are losers—but not Robert, of course (6.3)—and how the young folks have no talent, just a lot of "invisible nonsense" (6.8, 11).
This is Robert in high jerk mode, so we probably don't agree with him, but at least we see how he sees the world. That's one use of the limited omniscient view: it puts us closer to the characters (even when they're being jerkbags).
Then we see the same class from Juan's POV as Robert goes up to read his poem. Robert may have thought Juan wasn't talented, and—surprise—Juan agrees, thinking that he's no good.
What is surprising to us is that through Juan's POV, we see that Juan really likes Robert's poetry. So Robert might look at this kid and see someone who doesn't know how to read, but we know that Juan really does appreciate the poetry (6.35). So here's a use for what is called "free indirect discourse": when we see the same scene through multiple POVs, we can see how some characters don't really know what's going on.
And there's at least one other use for limiting the omniscient view, which is to increase suspense. For instance, when Alfred Vaz tries to stop Miri and Juan from going into the lab in Chapter 22, we see the end of the attack from Miri's POV and we hear more about what she feels.
So we get told about "a numbing tingle" on her side, but we don't hear what happens to Juan (22.63). All we get from Miri's POV (since she fell into the tunnels) is that Juan yells for her to run and then she hears "a meaty crunching sound" (22.65), which: yuck. So Miri—and we—don't know if Alfred killed Juan or knocked him out or what. Because the scene is limited to her POV, we're left with some mystery and suspense.