Who is the narrator, can she or he read minds, and, more importantly, can we trust her or him?
First Person (Central Character)
Our narrator is working really hard in this story—not only is she narrating the whole thing, she's also a central character. Well, we're putting it mildly: she's the protagonist.
And she's a very likeable, sympathetic protagonist at that. She seems to care a lot about other people's feelings and she's been through some pretty hard times, as we discuss at length in her analysis over in the "Characters" section. She also talks to us readers in a friendly, conversational way (for more on this, check out the "Writing Style" section). All of this means we're totally primed to see things from her point of view.
As much as we might like our point of view character, though, we've always got to be a little wary when every view we get of the other characters is filtered through that one character's perspective. The danger is that we're only getting one character's take on all the other characters and events in the story and we can't always know right off the bat whether we can trust that character to tell us the real deal.
For instance, as much as it seems like we're getting a glimpse of Dee in the following passage, we've got to keep in mind that we're just getting the narrator's impressions of her. She observes:
Dee wanted nice things. A yellow organdy dress to wear to her graduation from high school […] She was determined to stare down any disaster in her efforts. (12)
The thing is, though, that the narrator's description of Dee jives pretty well with what we end up seeing of her later in the story; she is someone who wants (other people's) things and who is willing to be aggressively confrontational to get them.
This doesn't mean that the narrator is giving us the complete picture of the world of the story—that would be straight-up impossible. But it helps to build our trust in what the narrator does tell us.
Whew—we can all breathe a sigh of relief for having a reliable narrator.