words to illustrate the perspective.

The day my son Laurie started kindergarten he renounced corduroy overalls with bibs and began wearing blue jeans with a belt; I watched him go off the first morning with the older girl next door, seeing clearly that an era of my life was ended, my sweet-voiced nursery-school tot replaced by a longtrousered, swaggering character who forgot to stop at the corner and wave good-bye to me.

The closeness of her point of view are especially important in a suspenseful, dark tale like “Charles.” The first-person point of view is often useful in stories which have something to reveal, because the narrator’s perceptions can keep both the reader, and sometimes the narrator herself, from discovering the truth. For example, in the movie The Sixth Sense (1999), the first-person point of view is central to delivering the biggest twist in the tale.

Further, the first person point of view also allows writers to bring an unreliable narrator into play. An unreliable narrator is one who deliberately keeps the truth from the reader, such as the protagonist of Gillian Flynn’s novel Gone Girl (2012). In "Charles," although Laurie’s mother does not deliberately mislead us, she is a kind of unreliable narrator known as the “naif.” Her naïveté or clueless approach blinds her to the truth about her son, which produces the central tension in “Charles.” Consider the following exchange:

“How was school today?” I asked, elaborately casual.

“All right,” he said.

“Did you learn anything?” his father asked.

Laurie regarded his father coldly. “I didn’t learn nothing,” he said.

“Anything,” I said. “Didn’t learn anything.”

Instead of focusing on Laurie’s cold and insolent reply to his father, the mother’s point of view fixates on the grammatical error in his speech. Similarly, the identity of Charles himself is protected by the mother’s naive first-person voice. Laurie has been coming home with tales of his new classmate Charles’ exploits in kindergarten, while his own behavior has been worsening before his mother’s eyes.

“You know what Charles did?” he demanded, following me through the door. “Charles yelled so in school they sent a boy in from first grade to tell the teacher she had to make Charles keep quiet, and so Charles had to stay after school. And so all the children stayed to watch him.”

“What did he do?” I asked.

“He just sat there,” Laurie said, climbing into his chair at the table. “Hi, Pop, y’old dust mop.”

“Charles had to stay after school today,” I told my husband.

“Everyone stayed with him.”

As we can see above, the mother believes Laurie’s unlikely story that a kindergartner was made to stay back in school for a classmate’s misdemeanors. Simultaneously, she ignores Laurie’s disrespectful way of addressing his father. To the reader, suspicions about Charles’ existence are growing, but the mother’s first-person point of view shuts her off to the truth, exposing her to the devastating reveal of the story. The first-person perspective allows Jackson to twist the knife fully, as we can see in this exchange between Laurie’s mother and his teacher.

“Laurie usually adjusts very quickly,” I said. “I suppose this time it’s Charles’s influence.”

“Charles?”

“Yes,” I said, laughing, “you must have your hands full in that kindergarten, with Charles.”

“Charles?” she said. “We don’t have any Charles in the kindergarten.

Would such a reveal have been possible with a third-person limited point of view? I think while the story could have been crafted from a third-person limited perspective, it is the first person which lends it most immediacy and makes the naïveté of Laurie’s parents all the more pointed.

Shirley Jackson's celebrated short story "Charles" is written using first-person narration. In the first person, the narrator tells the story from their limited point of view, and all the other characters are described using the pronouns "he," "she," and "they." Using first-person narration, the audience only knows how much the narrator is willing to share, which can produce a surprise ending.

In the short story, Laurie's mother recalls her experience of sending her child to kindergarten. She narrates the entire story, and the audience cannot understand Laurie's thoughts or feelings. If the story were told using third-person omniscient narration, the audience would be able to understand Laurie's thoughts and understand that he has created an alias named Charles.

Using first-person narration, Jackson also creates dramatic irony as the audience anticipates that Laurie's alias is Charles. At the end of the story, Laurie's mother meets her son's kindergarten teacher and discovers that Laurie's alias is Charles, which is an unexpected, surprise ending.

Overall, Jackson's short story "Charles" is written using first-person narration, and the narrator purposely withholds certain information to create an unexpected, surprise ending.