Point of View

All six of the short stories collected in The Cockatoos are written from the third person point of view. In the majority of the enclosed stories, the third person narrators are either limited to a specific character’s consciousness, or employ free indirect discourse. This means that the third person narrators are able to shift between the consciousnesses of the various primary characters and to thus describe the narrative world according to their experiences of it. In a short story like “The Full Belly,” the third person narrator primarily inhabits the main character Costa Iordanou’s consciousness. Therefore, the narrative action and tension originates from Costa’s “permanent ache of emptiness,” and in turn traces his attempts to alleviate this spiritual and “physical distress” (112). By way of contrast, in short stories like “A Woman’s Hand” and “The Night the Prowler,” the third person narrator...