Point of View

"The Daffodil Sky" moves between the protagonist's solitary return in the present and his passions and crime in the past. In both the present scenes and the flashbacks Bates employs a limited, omniscient narrator. This type of narrator relates events in the third person ("he," "she," and "they") and offers insight into the minds of a limited number of characters—in this case, the protagonist's alone. This point of view makes the story more engaging than it might be otherwise. In using this approach, Bates blocks out the thoughts of the remaining characters, and he leaves the reader as uncertain about their motivations and attitudes as the protagonist. This uncertainty diminishes sympathy for the protagonist and magnifies the gravity of his crime, for the reader cannot be certain that he is justified in believing that Cora Whitehead was unfaithful.

If, in contrast, the thoughts of...