Point of View

Ray Bradbury tells his story collection “A Medicine for Melancholy” in the first and third-person limited-omniscient points of view. The stories “The First Night of Lent”, “The Town Where No One Got Off”, “The Little Mice”, and “The Screaming Woman” are told in the first-person limited-omniscient perspective, while all 27 other stories are told in the third-person perspective. Only the narrator in “The Screaming Woman” is named, revealed to be 10-year-old Margaret Leary, the only person who can hear the screaming woman at first. The first-person narrative mode gives the reader access to information other characters in the stories do not have, such as in the case of Margaret and the Screaming Woman. The reader knows Margaret is telling the truth, even if other characters in the story do not believe her. Likewise, the limited-omniscient aspect to the stories creates a sense of drama and the...