Who is the narrator, can she or he read minds, and, more importantly, can we trust her or him?
First Person (Central Narrator), Various Forms of Third Person
The stories in this book are varied. Some feel like straight-up short fiction; others seem more like academic essays or autobiography. The use of narrative point-of-view also changes with each story, so stay on your toes.
The first two stories, "Nineteen Fifty-Five" and "How Did I Get Away with Killing the Biggest Lawyer in the State? It Was Easy" are first-person, conversational narratives. It feels as if the narrator is addressing us directly, chatting us up on the front porch:
The deacon writes me a check for five hundred dollars, the boy grunts his awareness of the transaction, and I am laughing all over myself by the time I rejoin J. T. (Nineteen Fifty-Five.15)
"Advancing Luna—and Ida B. Wells" also uses first-person narration, but with a difference. While it's never safe to assume that a narrative voice belongs to the author, you would be forgiven for doing it here because Walker includes details of her own life (attendance at Sarah Lawrence, for example, and bits about her working life). She also steps outside the story to talk about writing it:
That is the "story." It has an "unresolved" ending. That is because Freddie Pye and Luna are still alive, as am I. However, one evening while talking to a friend, I heard myself say that I had, in fact, written two endings. (Luna.Afterwords.1)
First person also comes into play for "Laurel" and creates a "punchline" ending because the narrator is limited by her own experience—she doesn't know that Laurel continued to send letters to her. Her ex-husband delivers her a gut punch in the last paragraphs:
His last letters were brutal. He blamed you for everything, even the accident, accusing you of awful, nasty things. He became a bitter, vindictive man. (Laurel.102)
But Walker doesn't stop with first person. She uses third-person narration to dive deep into the main characters' thoughts and feelings as well. In "Elethia," "Coming Apart: By Way of Introduction to Lorde, Teish and Gardner," "The Abortion," and "Porn," we see female characters dealing with some hard stuff head-on. And there's nowhere for them to hide from Walker's forthright revelations:
She wanted him to want the baby so much he would try to save its life. On the other hand, she did not permit such presumptuousness. (Abortion.8)
This insight gets brutal at times, as in this bit from "Coming Apart: By Way of Introduction to Lorde, Teish and Gardner":
He knows that to make love to his wife as she really is—indeed, to make love to any other human being as they really are—will require a soul-rending look into himself, and the thought of this virtually straightens his hair. (Coming Apart.63)
There's more where that came from, too. The other third-person narratives—"The Lover," "Fame," "A Sudden Trip Home in the Spring," and "Source"—force the characters to reveal even the ugliest bits of their personalities to us. Walker is all about getting at the root of things so that we can finally get to the truth.