Narrator and point of view

“Blink and You Miss It” by Alex Garland is a first-person account of a narrator who is also a character in the short story. As a result, the narrative is subjective, presenting only the young narrator’s point of view on the events.

Although the narrator does not make his gender known explicitly, we can assume that he is a young man because he compares himself with a young boy from his neighbourhood in England: “Twelve years to go until he's in an abject free-fall, if he's anything like me. And he could well be. At five, I was certainly the kind of kid who looked both ways before crossing the road.”

Furthermore, given that the author, Alex Garland, also spent time in Thailand, we can assume the story has been inspired by biographical events and, thus, the narrator is a literary persona of the author.

Given that the main story is told in retrospect, the narrator already knows everything that has happened, and constantly indicates this to readers through certain judgements he makes in the pr...