Point of View

"Young Girls" is written from the first-person perspective of an adult male narrator who reflects on his adolescence. He remembers specifically a time when a group of five or six aristocratic girls started spending time in his town intermittently. As a young boy, the narrator becomes preoccupied with the girls and intrigued by their presence, desiring to be closer to them and for them to know who he is.

That the story is written as a manifestation of the narrator's memory is significant because it generates an element of distance between the present-day narrator and his younger self. It is not the adolescent boy telling the story but instead a grown adult who can look back on his adolescence with both critique and earnestness. In this way, the story features a self-aware narrator who acknowledges the naiveté of his youth at the same time he...