Point of View

The narrative point of view in Wharton's "Pomegranate Seed" is third-person limited. In a work of fiction related from a third-person limited point of view, the narrator is not a character in the story, but someone outside of it who refers to the characters as "he," "she," and "they." This outside narrator, however, is not omniscient (or all-knowing), but is limited in knowledge to the perceptions of one or more of the characters in the story. The narrator of "Pomegranate Seed," and therefore its reader, sees the events of the story through the eyes of Charlotte Ashby, even though it is not Charlotte herself who tells the story. The story's readers never have more information than Charlotte does at any point in the narrative, and are thus more fully involved in the story's mystery than they might have been if it were told by an omniscient...