Narrator and point of view

The short story “Dry September” by William Faulkner is narrated in the past tense by an unknown third-person narrator. The only exception from the past tense is the dialogue, which makes use of the present tense.

The narrator is reliable, because he or she appears to recount the events as they happen. The narrator’s credibility is not compromised in any way, since the narration does not seem fragmented and the reader’s understanding of the text is not impaired.

The narrator is mostly objective. This is because the narration conveys only the facts of the story. The narrator recounts the characters’ actions but does not interpret them and rarely describes the character’s state of mind or openly passes judgement.

The characters’ emotions or thoughts are rarely described directly. One instance where the narrator is explicit about what characters think and feel is the scene portraying the class difference between Minnie and her peers:

(…) her contemporaries while still children enough to be unclass-conscious.
She was the last to realize that she was losing ground; that those among whom she had been a little brighter and louder flame than any other were beginning to learn the pleasur...