Who is the narrator, can she or he read minds, and, more importantly, can we trust her or him?
First Person (Central)
The Body of Christopher Creed is written in the first person, but Christopher Creed—the dude in the title—isn't our narrator. That's kind of unusual, right? We think so anyway. The narrator instead is Torey Adams, a young man who's a little obsessed with figuring out what's happened to Chris Creed. Okay, let's make that a lot obsessed.
So what gives with Torey Adams telling us the story instead of Chris? Well for one thing, Chris is missing. And while it would totally be interesting to hear this story from his perspective, it would also be quite a different read. For one thing, there'd be no mystery to solve. Additionally, though, at the heart of this book is the story of Torey's transformation from self-absorbed popular kid to someone who truly cares for other people and learns to reject the easy path to social acceptance. In other words, Chris might be missing, but this is Torey's story. So it's fitting he tells it.
As for the first-person perspective, we don't know if you know this about Torey, but thinking is kind of his thing (hop on over to the "Characters" section for more on this). And so though we could totally witness his transformation if we had a narrator who wasn’t inside his head, we'd miss out on a lot of the subtler moments and a whole lot of Torey's inner-workings. Since he's trying to sort through some pretty big ideas, we get a clearer picture of him—which helps us care about him more—because we're right there, hanging out inside his head.