Characters are created in stories using different literary devices. One of these devices is the choice of what perspective, or “Point of View,” the story will be told from. This depends on the type of narrator chosen for the story, and that narrator’s investment/participation in the story. Narrators cross the spectrum from first person narrators who are part of the action to third person narrators who are outsiders looking in on the action. They also vary from impartial to “all-knowing,” or omniscient, narrators. Generally, the bigger part the narrator plays in a story, the more distance between the story/characters and the reader. With the narrator as intermediary, or “filter,” the reader is therefore one step removed from his or her experience with the story and its characters. Point of View helps reveal how the author wants us to see the world of his story.
Authors Zora Neale Hurston and Sherwood Anderson use very different types of narration in their respective stories, “Sweat” and “Death in the Woods.” In “Sweat,” the narrator is
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The Village Men in “Sweat” validate exactly what we have already learned from Delia’s and Sykes’ prolific dialogs. Sykes intention to scare Delia with the snake is evident when he says, “Look in de box dere Delia, Ah done brung yuh somethin’!” (Hurston 4). Delia replies, “Syke! Syke, mah Gawd! You take dat rattlesnake ‘way from here!” (Hurston 4). Still, because of the dreamlike view in “Death in the Woods,” the reader is unsure which parts of the memory are real and which parts are imagined. The story seems to drift back and forth between actual events, the narrator’s fantasies and imaginings around those events, and the local legend surrounding the death, all through the eyes of the narrator. Evidence of the narrator’s reflection of the events as he perceived them show when he states, “…she was, I think, a bound girl and the wife had her suspicions.” (Anderson