Point of View

The story’s narration is written in the third-person and the past tense. The story is narrated by a specific but unnamed narrator. The narrator’s grandmother, as a young girl, was present during the wedding ceremony, and she has often told the story of that day to the narrator. Thus, instead of the story being directly conveyed by an omniscient narrator, the story is conveyed third-hand, decades after the actual events of the story occurred. This perspectival distance creates an inherent unreliability in the narration, as the recounting of the events may have become distorted due to being retold and the distance of time. Thus, the story has an air of fable, and the reader is, perhaps, given more freedom of interpretation.

In practical terms, the narrator is operating on hearsay and his grandmother’s accounts. Thus, the narration often appears hybridized between limited...