Who is the narrator, can she or he read minds, and, more importantly, can we trust her or him?
Third Person (Limited Omniscient)
Make no mistake: "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" is told in third person, but if we're not careful, we could make the mistake of thinking the story's point of view is first person. D'oh!
The thing is, we're sooo deeply inside Granny's head that at times it really feels like the story is being told from her point of view (check out Shmoop's discussion of modernism and stream of consciousness if you'd like to learn more). Consider this thought, for instance:
So, my dear Lord, this is my death and I wasn't even thinking about it. (57)
That's straight-up Granny, right? You'll notice from the "my" and "I" that this particular thought is even expressed in the first person voice—but don't be fooled. The story as a whole is told in third person because we do indeed have a narrator who reports what Granny is doing using third person pronouns--"she meant to wave goodbye," "she lay and drowsed," "she was rummaging around."
Another reason we might have trouble identifying who is telling the story right away is because the narrator is an unobtrusive presence, a wallflower at the party, so to speak. If we were being critical, we might even accuse the narrator of being kind of lazy. After all, he or she never bothers describing the appearances of the characters or the setting of the room that we're trapped in with Granny. For crying out loud, this narrator doesn't even bother to write any dialogue tags (those are the little "he said" and "she said" phrases usually following lines of dialogue after dialogue; this narrator just plops the lines down). As far as letting us know what the narrator actually thinks about Granny? Pfft, forget it.
Maybe we shouldn't be so hard on our tight-lipped narrator. It could be that the narrator is just trying to keep our attention on Granny's thoughts and impressions—that's pretty much the meat of this story anyway, right? Plus, come to think of it, maybe it's kind of nice that this narrator's not throwing in his or her own thoughts every two seconds and instead leaves it up to us readers to draw our own conclusions about Granny. Perhaps we actually ought to thank this narrator for trusting us so much…maybe they knew what they were doing after all.