Narrator and point of view

In the short story “Me and Mr. Harry” by Batya Swift Yasgur, the narrator is also the main character. As with every first-person narrator, we recommend that you focus on the narrator’s reliability.

First, note that the narrator is still a child, which indicates that her way of rendering the events should be questioned. In this story’s case, the narrator is naïve and immature (she cannot spell the word “mortgage”, she does not know what an “expert” is, and she is easily persuaded by simple things like eating cookies and building snowmen).

Then, because she is so deeply emotionally involved in her relationship with Mr. Harry, her way of depicting the events is subjective and it often does not do enough justice to other characters:

Mommy’s eyes are teary all the time, but Daddy does a lot of barking. ‘Ple...