Point of View

One of the most striking features of Lydia Davis’s Collected Stories is the variety of perspectives she employs, ranging from conventional first-person narration to detached third-person description and, at times, experimental voices that blur the line between speaker and subject. Unlike novels that settle into a stable vantage point, Davis’s short works often experiment with point of view on a story-by-story basis, using shifts in perspective as a way to unsettle the reader and expose the fragility of perception and communication.

The first-person voice dominates much of Davis’s work, particularly in her more confessional or diaristic pieces. Stories such as “The Meeting” or “Thyroid Diary” create intimacy through a narrator who seems to speak directly to the reader, but that intimacy is frequently undermined by self-doubt, over-analysis, or obsessive repetition. These narrators are not always reliable. Their accounts are fragmented, colored by...