Point of View

A Few Red Drops employs the third-person omniscient point of view throughout every chapter of the book. While acknowledging the existence of a reader and the author’s identity – such as when Hartfield writes “Now men, women, and children all around us continue to follow in her footsteps” (121) – Hartfield for the most part writes with some distance from her material. Her narrative voice is omniscient in that it captures the thoughts of groups of people such as the Irish, black Chicagoans, etc. with equal depth.

Hartfield only strays from this perspective in the first few chapters and epilogue of the book: specifically, the first part – containing two chapters – contains significant generalizations about the importance of Chicago’s race riots to black and American history, while the epilogue makes similar generalizations speaking to the lessons young Americans can learn from these events. By placing herself in...