Point of View

"Bad Influence" is a narration of Rita's summer according to her point of view, the account of which shifts over time. At the opening, Rita's narrative is intensely critical, sarcastic, and very funny. She is a classically exasperated, smart aleck teenager with typically hyperbolic, derogatory opinions about her elders. Everything about Puerto Rico is insufferable in her eyes until she spends a beautiful morning at the beach with her grandmother, while Papá Juan attends to Angela and her mother. Once she makes friends with Angela and celebrates her fifteenth birthday with a huge fiesta, her perspective gradually shifts and softens; Rita acclimates to life on the island and begins to enjoy herself, rather than enduring it. Although she by no means drops her sarcastic, know-it-all tone, even her criticisms have a lighter, kinder tone. For example, at the opening of the story she calls her...