The Shawl

Point of view describes the position from which the events of a story are presented to the reader. The primary distinction between points of view is between the first and the third person. (Second person, or a story told using “you,” is rarely employed in literary fiction.) Third person describes a narrator who refers to characters other than themself. First person refers to a narrator who describes a set of events that they participated in or directly witnessed. “The Shawl” is broken up into two distinct sections, each with its own point of view. The first section is written in the third person, and the second section uses the first person. One of the central conflicts of the story, the death of the 9-year-old daughter, is described differently in each section. In the first section, it is presented as an act of sacrifice, Aanakwad sacrifices her own daughter to save herself and her baby. In the second section, when the point of view has shifted from third to first person, the narrator describes the girl’s death as an act of self-sacrifice—the girl sacrifices herself to save her mother and younger sibling. This shift in