Point of View

"We Didn't" is written in first person as the narrator chronicles his past experience with a lover in his adolescence. The story provides an intimate portrait of teenage boyhood, specifically with regard to sex, and the first person point of view helps establish the story as a deeply personal one. The story is written primarily in past tense, suggesting that the older, more mature narrator is reflecting on his past growing up in Chicago. Occasionally throughout the story, this older narrator interjects with thoughts of his own. After listing a number of places in which his younger self did not lose his virginity, for example, the narrator says, "How adept we were at fumbling, how perfectly mistimed our timing, how utterly we confused energy with ecstasy" (234). These digressions from the past tense plot to present-tense reflection suggest that the narrator has grown to see his...