Point of View

The Door is told from the first person point of view of a narrator who remains unnamed until almost the end of the story. Then, her name is used only once. This narrator tells this story as a confession because she believes she was responsible for the death of Emerence, an eccentric old lady who cleaned house for her.

The Door could not be told from a perspective other than that of the narrator. The narrator's guilty feeling for having let her friend down is the basis of the novel. The story line itself consists of the narrator's experiences as she gets to know and understand Emerence and her way of thinking.

Emerence could not have told the story because she would not have seen herself from the same angle as the young narrator. Even though the young narrator does not completely understand Emerence, she...