Point of View

Since Sudden Fiction International is a collection of short stories, each individual story has a separate point-of-view. That being said, about half of the stories in the collection are told in a third person omniscient point of view. In these stories, the reader is given the impression of a quick pseudo-scientific appraisal of a moment in time. This is true, for example, in A Lover's Ear and The Model, two stories about heartbreak and loss that contain clinical narration, uncolored by vicarious character emotion. Moreover, some stories contain narration that borders on wonky. These stories, like Happy Endings, dissect the very notion of storytelling. In Happy Endings, Atwood uses this technique to critique the idea of an original narrative. In On Hope, this self-awareness is employed as a punch line at the end of a fairly straightforward narrative.

The first person point-of-view stories are a bit...