Point of View

In his review of A Day in the Dark, Edwin Morgan writes, "in this rich selection of her short stories the communication is often an ambiguity or a mystery which the imagination of the reader must try to unravel or complete." One way Bowen accomplishes this is by relating the plot through the narrator's limited point of view. Barbie tells the story as an adult but refuses to add any details that she did not observe or conclusions she did not make during that afternoon. At one point, she claims that memory has failed her and that she has lost half of her conversation with Miss Banderry. This truncated version forces readers to think about omitted parts of the experience and ambiguous parts of the story, like Barbie's sense of danger and dread. Yet this narrative technique provides a truer portrait of Barbie's experience, that of...