Narrator and point of view

The short story “Spoil the Child” by Howard Fast is a first-person account of a child-narrator, a twelve-year-old boy named David.

The account is in the past tense, which means the events had already happened, yet there is no indication that the time of the narration is when David is already grown-up. On the contrary, the use of typical child words such as “pa” and “ma” indicates that the narrator might still be a child even when he accounts the events.

The narrator presents the action from his point of view from the time of the events. He is a limited narrator as he has no access to the other characters' thoughts or knowledge. For instance, he does not know that his mother is pregnant until the end of the short story when he sees the new-bor...