Multiple Points of View in The Poisonwood Bible

Author Barbara Kingsolver, in her The Poisonwood Bible, uses multiple points of view to tell the story of a family of missionaries that move to the Congo to missionvwork amidst a cloud of political turmoil. The points of view in this story cycle between the mother Orleanna, an her four children Leah, Adah, Ruth May, and Rachel, while skipping over the father’s point of view during the entirety of the novel. The multiple points of view allow the author to represent the family in almost every respect. Each daughter and the mother have their views equally characterized through their own point of view.
One author writes that multiple points of view “allows an author to piece together a complex story without requiring a single character to know and see everything” (Coe). I think this definitely applies to The Poisonwood Bible. Since there are so many characters and the back drop is set in the midst of a political revolution the story can become quite cloudy. By using the tool of having multiple points of view the author is able to show many different things in the story without giving away too much.
Also, I think that the multiple points of view allows the author to use subtlety in revealing different character details. For example, throughout Adah’s points of view we see her disability come into play while it goes unrecognized, for the most part, by the other sisters. For example, at the end of Adah’s first chapter in Genesis she says “It is true I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell” (Kingsolver 34).
Also, I think it’s very interesting how Kingsolver uses the multiple points of view for everyone except the father but is very good at giving a representation of the father through other points of view. For example, the reader is able to understand the father’s stubbornness through other’s such as when he stung by the plant after being told repeatedly that it would hurt him if he did not handle it right and when he repeatedly preaches to the tribes people, embarrassing them about their social normality.
Finally, one author says that multiple narration is usually used in documentaries and I find this very interesting because the novel itself almost reads as if it were a documentary and the women of the family are being interviewed (Love). Like in a interview documentary we only see what the girls choose to reveal to us and that makes the story itself more suspenseful as a whole.
Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible is a classic example of novels that use multiple points of view. This multiple points of view allows the reader to maintain suspense throughout by not revealing everything all at once and only revealing what the characters choose to reveal. One very interesting thing in the novel that arises from the multiple points of view is the representation of the father who is portrayed perfectly without having a point of view himself. The novel is a great piece of literature and one of the only ones that is able to make multiple points of view work like clockwork.
 


Works Cited
Coe, David. “Point of View. Single VS Multiple.” January 5th 2009. Magical Words: Writing Tips and Publishing Advice for Aspiring Novelists. http://magicalwords.net/david-b-coe/point-of-view-single-vs.-multiple/

Kinsolver, Barbara. The Poisonwood Bible. Copyright 1998. Haprper Collins Publishers. New York City, New York.

Love, Tim. Multiple Points of View. Published January 2006. University of Cambridge. http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~tpl/texts/multipovs.html