Point of View

The stories in this collection take on a variety of perspectives, allowing the author to explore each protagonist from a different angle and distance. In the first half of the collection, Le utilizes the first-person point of view exclusively, while the second half of the book makes use of the third-person perspective. For the most part, Le uses the first-person point of view with male narrators, while for his female protagonists, he uses third-person. This is true for all of the stories with the exception of Hiroshima, which is told from the first-person perspective of a young girl. All of the stories make use of a mix of in-scene exposition, dialogue, and flashback, allowing the narrator to move seamlessly between narrative modes.

The shifts in point of view create subtle changes in the reader's ability to access the emotions of the protagonists’. First-person does not...