Point of View

"The Colonel" is told from a first-person point of view through an unnamed speaker, "I." The speaker recounts her harrowing experience during a small dinner gathering in the home of the colonel, a powerful and vicious member of a military regime that is terrorizing the also unnamed country where the speaker is a visitor. The speaker describes the evening by providing a flat and objective list of what she saw, what she heard, and what occurred, rarely providing any personal response or emotional reactions. Nevertheless, the tension and fear that she experienced are evident just below the surface, as if she herself cannot quite believe what happened. Right at the outset she tells the reader/listener "What you have heard is true. I was in his house" (1). Here, her words sound like those of a witness, or someone confessing to something unbelievable.

There are only...