The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is written from the perspective of a third-person omniscient narrator. This allows King to relay the majority of the novel’s events from Trisha’s point of view, helping the reader empathize with her while maintaining narrative flexibility. At certain key moments, King uses his chosen narration style to illuminate the thoughts and actions of Trisha’s family members while she is missing. Although Trisha feels invisible to her family, the reader knows that they are distraught after discovering her missing.

King also uses the third-person omniscient style to provide the reader with key pieces of information that Trisha is not privy to. For example, after she turns northward in Chapter 9, “Top of the Seventh,” we learn that “this was a bad decision, the worst she’d made since leaving the path in the first place,” (233) as she narrowly misses finding a small town where she would have been saved. Moments like these heighten the tension of the narrative and allow the reader to feel as if they are both there with Trisha in the moment and rooting for her from afar.