Point of View

Each of the stories in First Person Singular is narrated in the past tense (with occasional asides in the present) by a first-person narrator. This provides a double meaning to the book's title, in that it is named for the last story in the collection but all of the stories are told in the grammatical tense of first person. All of the narrators are men looking back on earlier times in their lives in which something significant, and usually mysterious, happened to them, though they may not fully understand the significance of the events they are recalling. The narrators are confiding in the reader about what happened to them in an attempt to puzzle out the meaning of the events. Interestingly, in each story the reader is given virtually no background information about the narrator. The author does not provide many details about the other...