Point Of View In Meagan Ciesla's Darlin Sue

Often, short stories are deliberate in choices about how the plot is conveyed to the reader. In some chances, this is done through the perspective and point of view. In Meagan Ciesla’s Darlin Sue, she uses first person narration to tell the story of a woman and her failing relationships with her neighbor and her husband. The use of the this limited perspective leaves a lot of important connecting ideas in the dark to the reader. So this short story utilizes a first person point of view that is so unreliable yet not introspective enough for the full work to be a cohesive narrative about a woman and her relationships.
The unreliability of the narrative by Sue leaves out major plot explanations of the characterizations of Gary and his development as her husband. Gary is first introduced based on one quality alone: his boringness. Sue’s association with Gary, and thus our …show more content…
As the actual narrative of the story begins this image is quickly shattered when she was crying and he simply “ look at me like I was a joke and pat his stomach to signal he was going into the other room to root through the refrigerator.”(152). This initial dichotomy of these two facets of Gary is the first inclination of a possible downfall of the work. This theme continues with new scenes but the most drastic is his first attempt in the story to have sex with Sue and his first attempt with Nina and their resulting actions. With Sue he “started inching his hand slowly up the thigh of my scrub pants, trying to get his fingers under the drawstring waistband” and tries to seduce her after dinner (157). Later, we he is with Nina, and Sue sees him his she thinks that “nothing I knew about Gary could let him be the man on top of Nina, naked all the way down except a pair of chaps” (161). This change in Gary is never described, it is simply treated as a spectacle of awe. The most severe difference of this