One of the secrets of Carey's capabilities as a storyteller is a serious commitment to what is known as free indirect style, or the bending of third-person narrative around the viewpoint of the character who is being described.
I needed to write from the viewpoint of a character who was intelligent, compassionate and well informed but who, like me and like the reader, had no direct experience of the fighting in France.
In spite of the oft-stated claim that it's difficult to write from the viewpoint of a character not of one's sex, I had no problem identifying with my hero and allowing him to develop as he saw fit.
Park willfully triples the knottiness of the plot by dividing it into three parts—halting the story at a moment of crisis and looping back to retell it, or portions of it, from the viewpoint of a character other than Sookee.
One particular 360-degree shof of a swooping X-Wing dogfighting, smashing its way through enemies, as seen from the viewpoint of a character standing on the ground, is truly majestic.
The audience is in the pure viewpoint of the character.
And this took me the longest time to figure out, and I still have hard time explaining it, except to say, especially with a show about suspense, you want to put the audience into the viewpoint of the character whose scene it is.
In the argot of video games, Medal of Honor is a first-person shooter, meaning that players see the action from the viewpoint of the characters they control.
Still the basic Picoult touches are there such as the attention to detail, the narrative viewpoint of several characters rather than one, and a final twist that will be a surprise to some readers.
This image is reprised -- from a different angle -- at the film's conclusion, when we see the imminent collision from Earth, from the viewpoint of the characters around whom von Trier has built his film.
