9 “A Study of Shifting Perspective: How Change Reveals Emotion” by Franny Marzuki

In her short story titled “Girl,” Jamaica Kincaid writes of a mother berating her daughter. This single-sentence short story is overwhelming in more ways than one—with the lack of punctuation depriving the reader of pause and the harsh language feeling all too vivid and painful—but the use of the second person point of view stands out as the key feature. This story is largely taught for its use of this perspective, acting as an exercise of point of view for young creative writers to study. “Girl” functions as a great starting point to learn about how point of view can inform narrative and how it can impact the reader. However, ending the discussion of point of view here, simply at the usage of a unique perspective, would be reductive to the greater powers of point of view in literature. One of the most poignant uses of point of view is when an author employs a drastic shift, where the perspective used changes completely. Here, we’ll be looking at how an author can utilize this perspective shift through the novel The Monk of Mokha and analyze what it reveals about the characters, the author, and the reader.

The Monk of Mokha is a biography that chronicles the life of Mokhtar Alkhanshali as he works to bring Yemeni coffee to the competitive global market. The prose is biting, alive with Mokhtar’s wit and humor as he talks his way through increasingly dangerous situations. However, despite the clarity with which his personality shines through, his story is told through a third-party, author Dave Eggers. This makes the text read almost as a work of translation, with Eggers taking the stories that Mokhtar told him and attempting to represent them in a way that feels both genuine to Mokhtar’s voice and experience and also effective as a narrative. Eggers acts as a mostly silent narrator, telling Mokhtar’s story in a close third person point of view. It isn’t until the chapter titled “The Luciana,” which appears near the end of the text, that this narrative distance is broken, and Eggers enters the story. Mokhtar invites Eggers to his apartment to watch the ship Luciana bring his first batch of coffee into port—an emotional climax of the story—and the text calls Eggers “the guy writing a book about all this” (314). It’s important to remember that this is Eggers writing about himself; he is committed to his absence from the narrative, ensuring that Mokhtar dominates the text. It isn’t until two paragraphs later when Eggers finally reveals himself to us with the sequence “the writer was there, and we stood there.”

The moment reads a bit awkwardly since it’s such a large shift to how point of view has functioned throughout the story thus far. We fumble with this introduction of the first person plural, lost in the mix of Mokhtar and Eggers, questioning who the new unfamiliar narrator is. It soon becomes obvious that this is Eggers, as he describes Mokhtar in a way that feels impossibly closer. This unroots the narrative distance from before. Earlier in the text, Mokhtar becomes this almost untouchable character, a businessman that can talk his way out of any situation. But in this moment, Mokhtar is here. Standing in front of Eggers and the reader, unavoidable.

This change in the story is the ultimate goal of the point of view shift. It acts as an opening, a revealing of character and author. Both Mokhtar and Eggers emerge in striking detail through this change; we see Mokhtar more grounded in the present, and we feel the care that Eggers puts to forefront Mokhtar beyond all else. A change in point of view also impacts how we, as readers, interact with the story. Suddenly, the foundation we knew is soft under our feet, forcing us to pay attention to every new detail. In this space allowed by a shifting point of view, we can reflect on how we interact with literature as an art form. We allow the ground to open up, giving way to revelation.