Point of View

Most of the stories are related from the third-person, omniscient point of view typical of short stories. This point of view is appropriate for the types of fiction provided, especially for the novella Ship Fever. In these stories, the omniscient narrator is unnamed, completely reliable, and entirely effaced. The Behavior of the Hawkweeds is related in the first person point of view; here the narrator is reliable but does provide supposed thoughts and motivations of other characters. In this story, the narrator is the protagonist and central character in the fiction. Rare Bird begins with a moment of meta-fictional narrative intrusion as the narrator instructs the reader to "Imagine an April evening in 1762" (p. 59), but otherwise it is fairly traditional. The narrative intrusion gives the story a very intimate feeling as if it is a secret conversation between friends. The Marburg Sisters features the most complex...