Point of View Shifts and Pacing in Sanderson's Elantris

Elantris, the first novel of Brandon Sanderson, is an epic fantasy that employs multiple points of view in telling the story. The novel opens from the perspective of Prince Raoden who has just been transformed by the Shaod and is promptly thrown into the fallen city of Elantris. The second point of view follows Sarene, Raoden’s unsuspecting fiancée as she lands in the city Kae to find her betrothed “dead” and her married to him by contract. The third primary point of view character is Hrathen, a scheming Derethi priest sent to Kae to convert its citizens. These three characters start the story with very different plots, which slowly converge into one another over the course of the 200,000-word novel. Sanderson’s use of these varying points of view directly impact the pace of the novel, at first used to rehash prior action from another character’s perspective and to fill in additional detail to scenes the reader already knows the outcome resulting in a slower pace and eventually switch…