Point of View

The Bartender’s Tale employs the first-person perspective of Rusty, who focuses on the summer of 1960 (“half a century ago”), when he was twelve years old (134). The point of view is invariably Rusty’s, but the narrative voice gains complexity from the constant shifts between Rusty’s limited perspective at the time that he describes, and his interpretation of events from a retrospective position.

Thus, a tendency to over-dramatize every minor incident reflects the child’s enthusiasm and sense of wonder, which colors the summary of “a welcoming party of sheep, an excursion through the saloon, and meeting the king of all trees,” on his first day in Gros Ventre (19). But the narrator regularly distances himself from his youthful self, emphasizing the ordinariness of his experiences by reminding the reader that “Somewhere in any of us is the memory of how it was at that...