Narrator and point of view

The short story “Saturday Afternoon” by Erskine Caldwell is a third-person account in which the narrator mostly uses the point of view of Tom Denny, one of the main characters. Although the tone of the narrator is detached, we often feel that he is describing everything from Tom’s perspective: “Tom was feeling good. Hubert gave him another drink in the woods. Hubert was all right. He made good corn whiskey. Tom liked him for that.”

Occasionally, we also sense that Tom’s perspective is the same as that of the white mob going to lynch Will Maxie: “But nobody liked Will. He made too much money by taking out the grass before laying by his cotton and corn. He made more money than Tom and Jim made in the butcher shop selling people meat.”

The narra...