First-Person Narrator

"Resurrection of a Life" is told entirely in the first person. The narrator begins by musing about the nature of memories and then provides a detailed account of what he was like in 1917. In the end, he returns to the present, telling the reader what he has learned since those days as a ten-year-old boy.

The description of the narrator's childhood is deeply personal, and most of the memories center around his thoughts, feelings, and attitudes at the time rather than around interactions and events. The narrator's memories of his childhood personality are so detailed that the reader often wonders how much is an accurate account of the boy's psyche at the time, and how much is the adult narrator's present view. Saroyan gives readers a clue that the narrator is at least partially inserting his present thoughts into the past when he names the films the...