Point of View

Dave Eggers tells the stories in his anthology "How We Are Hungry" from both the first-person perspective, and the third-person omniscient narrative. He switches between the forms of narration for each story, adopting one perspective or the other, as is fitting to the story. In the story "On Wanting to Have At Least Three Walls Up Before She Gets Home", Eggers adopts the third-person omniscient narrative to describe the efforts of a husband and soon-to-be father, totally in love with his wife, hard at work in the snow on a playhouse. Such a mode of narration gives the reader a brief glimpse into this man's life and love, and the third-person omniscient allows the reader to understand him without disturbing him. In "After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned", Eggers adopts the first-person perspective for his narrator, a dog. This allows him...