Narrator and point of view

The short story “Breakfast” by John Steinbeck is narrated from a first-person point of view by a narrator who remains unnamed and does not provide much insight into his thoughts.

While the story is told through the narrator’s perspective, he focuses on detailed descriptions of the setting and the characters, without revealing many details about himself. The story consists of the narrator’s one memory about a breakfast he shared, possibly in his youth, with three strangers that quite probably were a family of migrant workers. We do not know anything about the narrator, who he is, why he was traveling that morning, or the reason why he stopped to have breakfast with the three strangers. 

The story presents the narrator’s different points of view - in the present, as he looks back on this memorable moment in his life, and at the time when the encounter took place. The part of the story set in the present (at the beginning and end) is mainly used to indicate the narrator’s emotions, while the rest is more descript...