Point of View

The Two-Family House is written in third person from limited perspectives. The Prologue is written from the perspective of the midwife, and it is the only section written from her perspective. The midwife's actual appearance in the story line is in Chapter 16. The chapters change from one character's perspective to another throughout the entire novel. This lessens the limitations that keeping one character's throughout the novel could present.

Rose, Mort, Helen, and Abe have multiple chapters from their perspective. However, Natalie and Judith are the only two children who share their point of view. The purpose of using Judith's perspective is a means of letting the author show the confusion on the night of Teddy's and Natalie's birth from a character other than Rose and Helen. That allows the reader to understand that Judith believes there was an extraordinary event that night, though she does...