Point of View

In this collection of stories, the author employs first person narrative, third person narrative, third person subjective, and third person omniscient. In one story, The Other Side of the Border, he uses alternating person view, moving the plot forward from the view of Hands, Morrow, Billings, and Colley.

The stories that are written in first person narrative are usually the thoughts of a man who is a reporter or a writer. Sometimes the reader learns his name, and sometimes not. The exception to the male first person narrator in Cheap in August, when the narrator speaking in first person is a woman named Mary Stewart. There is one other story in the collection where the main character is told by a woman, An Appointment With the General, which is told in third person subjective.

Many of the stories are told in first person narrative, yet relate...