Point of View

The Women in Black is written from an omniscient third person point of view. This narrative vantage is able to connect Patty, Fay, Magda, and Lisa's disparate lives and characters. While all of the women are employees at Goode's Department Store, they each have their own set of private concerns and longings. The narrator provides access not only to each of their individual consciousnesses while they are sharing common physical spaces, but is able to move inside the women's personal lives outside the context of Goode's. Though the women see each other every day, they know little about each other at the start of the novel. For example, in Chapter 4, the narrator inhabits Patty's consciousness, revealing the way she thinks about her coworker, Fay. The chapter begins with the following line: "Fay Baines was twenty-nine if she was a day, and Patty Williams wondered if...