Narrator and point of view

The short story “Blackberries” by Leslie Norris is told from the point of view of a third-person narrator. 

The narrator is limited to the boy’s perspective and presents his thoughts and feelings, for example in the last paragraph:

He began to cry quietly, to himself, knowing that it was a different weeping to any he had experienced before, that he was crying for a different pain. And the child began to understand that they were different people; his father, his mother, himself, and that he must learn sometimes to be alone. (p. 60, ll. 5-11)

In the paragraph, the narrator allows us to see that the boy’s crying is not the same as the scared crying of a small child when they hear loud noises and arguing. Instead, the child is realizing an important reality of adult life in that moment, which means he is on his w...