Point of View

"Break It Down" is written from the first, second, and third person points of view. The first lines of the short story appear in the third person. In the second paragraph, the man described in the opening lines, becomes the first person narrator. Once the man begins describing the details of his recent affair, he shifts into the second person. Throughout the remainder of the story, the narration slips between first and second person, thus enacting the protagonist's struggle to rationalize the emotional value and cost of the 10 days he spent with his lover. Oftentimes these shifts between narrative vantages occur multiple times in the course of single sentences. One such example appears on the second page of the story. The narrator says: "everything about her has kind of bled into you, her smell, her voice, the way her body moves, it's all inside you...