Point of View

“The Gift Outright” is told from the first-person plural point of view. This “we” adopts the omniscient position of the historian, looking back to tell the story of his country but also able to state what that country would “become” (16). Moreover, since that “we” tells the story of its own self-forfeiture to the land, it consistently works to shift focus onto that land. This is evident in the very first line, “The land was ours before we were the land’s” (1). This phrasing treats the land as both subject and coda of the sentence, diminishing the prominence and activity of the narrator. The effect is to reflect the speaker’s own attitude, privileging that to which the “we” will give itself over. Moreover, the speaker constructs the next sentence such that the “we” is the grammatical object and passive agent of “Something we were withholding...