There There: On the Power of Literary Point of View

 Tommy Orange’s There There is an unusually real account of life from an oft-ignored population. It is the story of Oakland’s urban Natives, situated in the period leading up to the Big Oakland Powwow. Orange, like Jesmyn Ward in Sing, Unburied, Sing, opts to tell the story from several points of view. By rotating between 12 distinct narrators, he emphasizes the power of the individual and how their unique voices contribute to the unified plot.

Just as each character has a different personality, so too do the methods of storytelling vary with each person. For instance, some characters are portrayed in the first person. Hearing the character’s story directly from their mouth is an extremely effective way to introduce them while simultaneously educating the reader. This is clearly an important goal of the novel, as the Prologue and Interlude make it clear that Orange is angry about the current characterization of Native Americans, as well as the history that caused it. Tony, Edwin, Calvin, and Daniel speak and think the same way we do, and when they don’t, we can understand why.

Perhaps the best exercise in empathy comes in the form of Thomas Frank. Told from the second-person point of view, Thomas’s introduction casts the reader in the role of a struggling urban Native. The chapter is powerful because we are Thomas, and the writing makes it easy to believe so. Orange chooses Thomas’s chapter to be this way perhaps because no reader really wants to imagine themselves as the janitor character, which makes it all the more important that we do so. Orange provides a front row seat while he proves that Thomas is more than his occupation. We, as Thomas, reveal ourselves to be a functioning alcoholic and explain that we became one “without a thought” because “most addictions aren’t premeditated” (Orange 217).

Other chapters are told from the more familiar third-person perspective. Orange uses the omniscience of this point of view to tell the reader things about certain characters that they would not be likely to offer if telling their own story. This is most evident with Bill and Opal. Bill is old-fashioned and principled; he “can’t stand what the youth are allowed to become these days,” considering them to be “coddled babies” without work ethic (82). Being so judgmental, Bill doesn’t seem the type to readily admit his own faults, such as the time when “there were so many drugs coursing through him [that] it was hard to believe” (85). With Opal, her fervent superstition has replaced her native spirituality. She has distanced herself from those original beliefs to the point of being “openly against [Orvil, Loother, and Lony] doing anything Indian” (118). Therefore, even though she has lucky numbers and spoons, knocks on wood, and avoids sidewalk cracks, her superstition is something that Opal “would never admit to” (160).

There There is, among many other things, a novel about the power of perspective. The reader sees the plot through different people and through the various ways those people might tell the story. In the end, we are left with a new understanding of the urban Native American and their struggle to find a place in a society that has viewed their existence as an impossibility.