The authors of both “St. Lucy’s School for Girls Raised by Wolves” and “The Cathedral” use narrative in multiple ways to craft their short stories. Although very different in genre (science fiction vs. contemporary fiction), both pieces use the first-person perspective to fabricate meaningful experiences for the audience. In “St. Lucy’s School for Girls Raised by Wolves,” author Karen Russell tells the story of a special school designed to assimilate young girls into modern society after they have spent the majority of their lives as part of a wolf pack. The short-story has undertones of a metaphor describing every child’s struggle to grow up, and for this reason, the fact that the narrator is an adolescent girl is significant. From this …show more content…
By doing so, the audience experiences everything through the eyes of the narrator. The narrator, also being the story’s protagonist, attempts the attract the sympathy of the reader through his perspective of the exposition. For example, in the beginning of the short story, the narrator explains the blind man’s connection to his wife. It is during this phase of narrative that we get glimpses of a jealous undertone that will follow the narrator for the majority of the piece. This is first demonstrated on page 33 when he describes his wife’s ex-fiance: “Her officer—why should he have a name? he was the childhood sweetheart, and what more does he want?” This jealousness of another man’s affection towards his wife is again shown on page 34 when the wife reveals the narrator has no friends. This is an important fact used to show the significance of the wife, a person that actually cares for him and someone he doesn’t want to lose. The audience feels sympathy towards the narrator at this point as we observe the situation through his first-person perspective. This perspective influences the way the audience experiences the story and the reader can understand the narrator’s reasoning for being against housing a man that had a long and powerful connection to his