Narration

This story is told from the first person restricted point of view, which means that the events of the story are presented to the reader from the perspective of one character in the story, in this case Alfie Judah. This first-person narrative is important to Mukherjee's concern with immigrant Americans struggling to formulate a sense of self and a sense of cultural identity within their new environment. As Fakrul Alam has pointed out, "In most of the stories collected in The Middleman and in her third novel, Mukherjee eschews the omniscient/superior perspective she had adopted earlier and attempts to allow her new Americans to tell their own stories."

Setting

This story is set in an unnamed or fictitious Latin American country in which guerilla rebels are attempting a revolution. However, the story's setting is clearly meant to evoke real historical locations and political struggles in such Latin...