Point of View

Stories are presented from multiple points of view. The most commonly used point of view is third-person omniscient, where the interior thoughts and motivations of the protagonists are revealed. Narrators in third-person stories are unnamed, reliable, and entirely effaced. Within these stories, the narrators have a homogeneous voice that is objective and dispassionate. One story, The First Day, is narrated in the first person by a five-year-old girl going to public kindergarten for the first day of school. In this story, the narrator is sincere but obviously subjective and only partially reliable in that her observations are those of a child. In another story, The Store, the narrator also speaks in the first person and develops an extended story with complex characterization and an involved chronology. All of the stories are mated to a point of view suited to their presentation and the point of view...