Point of View

“They’re Made Out of Meat” does not abide by a conventional narrative presentation. Indeed, the short story lacks a narrative body. The entirety of the short story is presented as a dialogue between two unnamed and unidentified individuals. The author does not provide a narrative context. This means that there is no first, second, or third person narrator guiding the reader’s movement through the short story. Instead, the reader immediately learns that she must rely upon context clues from the two characters’ conversation in order to discern where they are, what they are discussing, and its implications.

The author intentionally omits a narrator’s presence in order to activate his reader’s imagination. Without the guidance of the narrator, the reader must inventive the narrative details otherwise omitted from the short story for herself. For example, the short story begins with the following...