Point of View

All of the stories with the exception of the story “Hearts in Atlantis” are told from the third-person point of view. Consider the opening sentence of “Low Men in Yellow Coats:” “Bobby Garfield’s father had been one of those fellows who start losing their hair in their twenties and are completely bald by the age of forty-five or so” (3). The narrators in all of these stories, like this one, are not involved in the action so they provide a relatively unbiased view of the action. There is generally a character of focus in each of these stories. For instance “Low Men in Yellow Coats” and “Heavenly Shades of Night are Falling” are focused on Bobby. The narrator is only able to report what Bobby sees, hears, and experiences. This form of narration keeps the reader from becoming too emotionally attached to any of the...