Point of View

"Girl" does not have a narrator in the conventional sense, because it does not have action in the conventional sense. There is no event, or series of events, acted out or told about by the characters or by a third-person narrator outside the action. Instead, the story is for the most part one speech delivered by the mother. The mother speaks in the first person referring to herself as "I" when she mentions "the slut I know you are so bent on becoming" and "the slut I have warned you against becoming." Far more important than the pronoun "I," however, is the pronoun "you." The mother directs her speech to her daughter, the "girl" of the title, and every instruction contains either the word "you" ("this is how you set a table for tea") or the implied "you" ("cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweet oil...