Point of View

The short story is written from the first person point of view of the unnamed protagonist. This narrative vantage point affects an intimate and confessional narrative tone. The narrator is situated in a temporal era decades after the events he is describing on the page. He is therefore recounting the story “in the warm (oh so warm!) glow of hindsight” (400). Throughout the short story, the narrator thus occupies two contrasting states of mind and experience at once. In one sense, he is an older man remembering the events that transpired in his French village during WWII. In another sense, he is a young man reliving his experiences with Cécile and the ways in which his love for her transformed his otherwise violent reality. He often remarks upon himself as a “boy who knows nothing of the world, or keeps mum about it if does...