Kate Chopin's The Story Of An Hour

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The importance of the point of view in which a story is told by, is very great when dealing with the tone of the story. Depending on the point of view, it shows what the character is dealing with, focus’ on the main conflict in different ways, and makes the story or passage interesting for the reader. In “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin, the point of view is third person limited omniscient, which means the story is told by a narrator but shows the feelings of a specific character. In this story, the focus is on Mrs. Mallard. The story shows only her feelings throughout the story. When she found out about her husband’s death, she heard the news “with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance” (paragraph 3). She was “pressed down…show more content…
The meaning of a story has to do with the plot or why the story was written. The meaning also revolves around the focus of a story. In “Story of an Hour”, the focus of the story is on Mrs. Mallard. If the point of view changed within the third person limited omniscient, then the story wouldn’t feel right. If the focus changed to a different character, like her sister Josephine, or any of the other woman and not on her, then the reader would be missing a huge part of the story. Mrs. Mallard is the one who knows Brently Mallard the best. She’s lived her life with him, she was his wife, she was the one he loved. It only feels natural that the author would focus on her. By focusing on her, we know somewhat the emotions and feelings she had. Through what we know about her and what the narrator tells us, we know she takes it hard when the news of her husband’s death reaches her, and even harder when she finds him alive. The meaning of this story, “the joy that kills”, is that she had strong emotions about her husband, whether love, relief, or sadness, and about his death, that when she saw him, her heart failed her. The point of view really fits the meaning of the story hand in
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