Point of View

The short story is written from a third person free indirect point of view. Over the course of the story, this third person narrator moves back and forth between Alma and Debi's consciousnesses. In the story's first five pages, the narrator inhabits Alma's psyche, absorbing and conveying her thoughts, feelings, and opinions as part of the narrative whole. On the story's sixth page, this same narrator shifts away from Alma, and into Debi's interiority. Halfway through page 11, the narrator returns to Alma, and throughout the remaining pages of the story, shifts more frequently between the two women's' vantage points. By writing the story from this point of view, the author is able to both thoroughly inhabit his two main characters' interior spaces, and to compare and contrast their distinct ways of seeing the world. The free indirect discourse also complicates and expands an otherwise simple...