Point of View

"The Love of a Good Woman" is written from the third person point of view. In the story's opening passages, this third person narrator assumes an omniscient tone, narrating outside of any particular character's consciousness as she describes Mr. Willens's optometrist's box. In the story's first section, "Jutland," this omniscient stance remains as the narrator describes the Jutland landscape: "This place was called Jutland. There had been a mill once, and some kind of small settlement, but that had all gone by the end of the last century, and the place had never amounted to much at any time" (4). In the same way that the narrator describes Mr. Willens's optometrist's case in a detached and authoritative voice, in this passage, the narrator describes Jutland from a removed narrative angle. As soon as Cece, Jimmy, and Bud enter the page, however, the narrator begins depicting the...