Narrator and point of view

In “Mule Killers” by Lydia Peelle, the narrator is also one of the characters. Although he does not experience the events in the story first-hand, he narrates the story he hears from his father. Also, the narrator is the key-element in the story, as the moment when he was conceived changed his father’s fate.

The story is told by a first-person narrator who has a limited point of view, as he is not directly involved in the action he describes, but only tells it as he hears it: “My father tells me this story in the garden, bent over and searching through the knee-high weeds for long thick stalks of asparagus…” (ll. 44-45). At some point, however, the narrator’s father stops his story, and the narrator imagines the rest:

But he still skips the part of the story where I come in. It doesn’t matter; I can imagine it. Before the door has even closed after Eula, something ...