What is the narrator point of view in the short story collection, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours?

As What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours consists of nine different stories, the point of view varies from story to story. “books and roses” is told in the third-person, though the perspective often closely follows Montserrat’s perspective; the reader does not know anything that Montserrat does not. This helps preserve some of the sense of magic and mystery surrounding Montserrat’s origins.

At other times, Oyeyemi uses the first-person perspective to help guide the reader towards an understanding of a character’s identity in a gentler, more natural way. In the same way that being gay is just a part of a person’s identity, not something that consumes every moment of thought, the first person perspective of “‘sorry’ does not sweeten her tea” helps ease the reader towards the revelation that the narrator, Anton, is a man in a relationship with another man named Noor, who was once married to a woman. These complicated realities and questions of identity are thus more naturally integrated into the story, providing background rather than dominating the story. The first part of “is your blood as red as this?” does something similar with Radha’s Indian roots. By allowing Radha to be the one to tell the story, the reader comes to understand Radha’s ethnicity through small details, such as her ability to read Hindi and her memories of her Gujarati grandfather.

The final story, “if a book is locked there’s probably a good reason for that don’t you think,” is the only story in the collection to use the second-person perspective. This gives the reader the experience of seeing Eva from the outside, as she is perceived by an albeit sympathetic outsider. The reader is forced to see the contradiction between shy, defiant Eva that she projects to the outside world, and the sensitive, easily wounded one that was writing in the diary between the ages of 13 and 15.