Narrative Point of View

This means: The point of view the story of the poem is being told from.

In this case, the speaker seems to be two different people speaking at once. At one level, we have
a 6-year-old girl who is waiting in the waiting room with her Aunt Consuelo. At another level we
have a much older woman remembering herself at the age of six and going through the process of
telling a story about when she came to an epiphany about her identity.

We know that both of these narrative points of view are available because the speaker is speaking
in the past tense, but she also manages to place us alongside the six-year-old girl as she is
making her realisations.

Looking at the two speakers:

The child – she lets us see the innocence of childhood. Through her we are able to go through the
process of epiphany. We join her as she realises what is happening to her and we sympathise and
feel her pain.

The adult – she brings some authority to the voice that is speaking. She is someone much older
who is reflecting on the experiences that she has had. We can trust this part of the voice a lot
more because of its age and experience, which helps add weight and authority to the whole
experience of the poem.

It’s quite clever that Bishop has been able to create these two narrative points of view so that they
exist at the same time but never seem to get in each other’s way. Their presence though is also
really important to some of the things that Bishop is trying to achieve with her poem.

Let’s think about one of Bishop’s main ideas in the poem: ‘the multiplicity of identity’, i.e. that we
are always who we shape ourselves to be, but we are also always the people that other people
know and create identities for and we are also always things like our gender, etc. which are
identities that we have no control over. What’s really interesting about Bishop’s narrative point of
view is that is manages to capture this idea of multiple personalities. By including both an adult
narrator and a child narrator in one, she is able to create a speaker that from the beginning suffers
from a split identity because basically, we have the same person speaking but as an adult and as
a child.

This point of view is really clever because it draws our attention to this idea of
split/fractured/fragmented identities right from the outset. Bishop has managed to create a poem
that is about the moment of realising that your identity isn’t completely stable that is told by a
speaker whose identity is completely unstable. So, the speaker herself actually represents what
the poem is about as a whole.

Questions:
1) What is narrative point of view?
2) What is/are the narrative point/s of view present in ‘In the Waiting Room’
3) Who are the speaker/s and how would you describe them? Use quotations from the poem
to support this answer.
4) What is clever about Bishop’s choice of narrative point of view?
5) How does Bishop’s use of narrative point of view help Bishop to express one of her
themes? You must use evidence to support your answer to this question.
6) Why do you think understanding the narrative point of view might be important to
understanding and appreciating this poem as a whole?