Point of View

This story is written in past tense, and it predominantly features an omniscient third-person narrator. At the end of the story, the narration is limited to Beryl’s perspective.

Despite the fact that the narrator is omniscient, the narrator takes on the personality of the characters involved in a particular scene. For example, the narrator expresses Stanley Burnell’s distaste for Jonathan Trout through rhetorical questions, such as “what was the matter with the man” (14). Whenever the narrator describes scenarios that do not involve residents of Crescent Bay, the narrator has a neutral demeanor, but when the narrator describes scenes that involve residents of the bay, the language and content shifts to accommodate for the personalities of the various characters.

The narrative perspective shifts at the end of the story in order to highlight the fact that each of the residents have their unique struggles...