Point of View

This story is written in past tense. Furthermore, the Paley employs a third-person perspective narration. Whether the narrator is omniscient or limited is ambiguous. On the surface, the narrator appears to be omniscient. However, upon closer inspection, one could deduce that the narrator is limited, which would provide insight about Peter’s character, particularly his egocentrism.

The ambiguous narrative scope highlights Peter’s egocentrism and his attempts to mask it. An omniscient narrator presents a description of the story that encompasses all characters’ thoughts and feelings, and it has a universal knowledge of all plot events. One might consider the narrator to be omniscient at first because of sentences that appear to highlight side characters’ thought processes. For example, Anna “allowed thirty seconds of silence” (44).

However, as the story, progresses, and possibly upon a second reading of the story, the reader may notice the fact...