perspective

In my book, Islands in the Stream by Ernest Hemingway, the perspective is told from a character named Thomas Hudson, an artist who lives in the Bahamas. In the first part of the book he has spent the summer with his three sons diving and fishing. We learn that he is twice divorced and suffers a lot from loneliness when his sons are with their mothers living in France. At the end of the first part of the book, after the summer is over and his sons have gone back to France, he receives a telegram informing that two of them and their mother have been killed in a car accident. This affects his perspective. 


A textual example of the character's perspective is this: "On the eastward crossing on the Île de France Thomas Hudson learned that hell was not necessarily as it was described by Dante or any other of the great hell-describers, but could be a comfortable, pleasant, ship taking you toward a country that you had always sailed for with anticipation." 


Thomas Hudson's perspective is directly revealed in the last chapter of the first part where is is sailing across the Atlantic to France for the funerals of his wife and sons. One example is: "he sat in the deep comfortable chair and drank his drink and learned that you cannot read the "New Yorker" when people that you love had just died." 


An example of how perspective is indirectly revealed comes later: "The sea air was cool and he ate a sandwich and two apples and then took some ice out of the bucket and made himself a drink. The Old Parr was about gone but he had another bottle and now in the cool of the early morning he sat in the comfortable chair and drank and read the New Yorker. He found that he could read it now and he found that he enjoyed drinking in the night. For years he had kept an absolute rule about not drinking in the night."


He never used to drink in the night, but now he is enjoying it, just as now he can read the New Yorker, which he couldn't before he started drinking. This indirectly shows how his perspective has been affected by the deaths of his sons.


Thomas Hudson is alone in his room on the ship. The narration is all his thoughts, so when you read it you are experiencing the same thoughts and sharing his perspective. "You haven't any problem at all he told himself. You've given them up and they're gone. You should not have loved them so damn much in the first place. You shouldn't have loved them and you shouldn't have loved their mother. Listen to the whiskey talking, he said to himself. What a solvent of our problems."