Short Stories for High School: Focus on Point of View
It’s time for the next installment in our series featuring our favorite short stories for high school students! We’ve covered the stories we like to use for teaching plot devices and characterization; today, we’re focusing on point of view in short stories.
Correctly identifying a text’s point of view is crucial to any prose analysis: the perspective from which a story is told makes a big difference in shaping our understanding of events, characters, and themes. And yet it’s something students really struggle with. Not only do they struggle to identify the basics (first-person, third-person limited, third-person omniscient), but they insist upon using paradoxical and confusing terms like “limited-omniscient.”
If your students are really struggling to identify the point of view in short stories, we’ve found it helpful to find a variety of paragraphs from an assortment of texts and have students practice identifying the point of view. It gives you an opportunity to add to their literary toolkit by giving them strategies like circling the pronouns or underlining private thoughts, and in addition to offering them practice, it can be a way to let your students sample a variety of texts.
(Helpful Hint: We liked to find high-interest YA books and use paragraphs we knew would get them intrigued about the book. Sneaky English teachers. Always trying to encourage reading.)
Point of View in Short Stories: Our Picks

We didn’t have any standout point of view texts in our standard-level classes (though an honorable mention goes to Isabel Allende’s “And of Clay Are We Created,” (1989) in which the story of a girl trapped in a mudslide in Colombia is told in first-person but from the perspective of a journalist), but in AP Literature, we spent quite a few years searching for the right assortment of texts.
We didn’t always give students a first-person point of view text to look at: most students have read a book or story by a first-person narrator by the time they reach AP Literature, and our discussion of Alice Munro’s “How I Met My Husband” (see our plot devices entry in this series), which utilizes a first-person narrator reflecting back on her own actions from an older and wiser perspective, included a focus on “older Edie’s” interjections into the narrative. Third-person limited point of view is another perspective many students are already familiar with and since we don’t have a title that’s jumping out at us to be included here, we’re skipping over it. (Note: If you need some title suggestions, though, let us know. We’re happy to help.)
We spent many years teaching Willa Cather’s “Paul’s Case” (1905) as an example of third-person omniscient point of view. This can be an easily dismissed point of view because it allows the author unlimited access (which is sometimes used to cheat a story’s end . . . boo), but used fairly, it can add a powerful new dimension to a work (see William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” (1930)).
With “Paul’s Case,” students enjoyed (and often related to) the story of Paul, a teenager who longs to live a glamorous life in New York rather than his ordinary life in a lower-middle-class family. He escapes to New York, and, when it’s clear his family has found him, commits suicide rather than return home.
We spend most of our time experiencing the world from Paul’s perspective, but there are several points at which we get other characters’ perspectives on Paul and his behavior, giving us a more complex picture: when we’re in his perspective we sympathize with him, but the other perspectives show us that his behavior and desires come across as frustrating and unrealistic to those around him.
We had a lot of good discussions of the text, but do be aware of your students’ personal backgrounds: we skipped the text some years because we knew there were students in class who really struggled with depression and suicidal ideation (or attempts).
Another text we found useful for class discussion was Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” (1927). The story was included in our textbook as an example of the objective point of view, in which the narrator functions as a roving camera with sound, presenting purely what can be seen with no commentary and no glimpses into characters’ thoughts.
It’s difficult to find a pure example because even using an adverb to describe how something is said moves into a narrator’s commentary and biases. And while the text does technically include one adverb, it is otherwise free from private thoughts and commentary, meaning students have to rely solely on clues in the text to determine the subject of the couple’s conversation. (The subject is abortion, so again, be mindful of the circumstances of students in your classroom.)
There is a lot to discuss in terms of how Hemingway conveys meaning without thoughts or commentary, how he allows us to sympathize with one character over another using this perspective, and how he provides clues as to the final decision the characters make without actually telling us what that decision is (or ever naming it for that matter).
Finally, we made sure every year’s short story prose unit included an excerpt from Charles Dickens’s Somebody’s Luggage (1862), which we found in Barbara Bloy’s English Literature: Close Reading and Analytic Writing (a text we highly recommend for close reading practice in PreAP and AP courses).
The excerpt is written in the second-person point of view (which lots of people, English teachers included, and ourselves until we started teaching AP Literature, don’t even know exists). Students often ask about this perspective, especially since usually we talk about it in terms of manuals and directions more than literature, giving us the opportunity to look at the benefits and drawbacks of using this perspective (and draw some conclusions about why it’s rarely used). The excerpt also requires students to grapple with Dickens’s language without necessarily taking on an entire novel, which is a useful exercise for students.
(Helpful Hint: We are also big fans of the carefully wielded second-person point of view in Katharine Brush’s “The Birthday Party” (1946). This is a released AP prompt, so you can find it on the College Board website. In our experience students really struggled with the text on their own, making the essays they wrote pretty disastrous, but in terms of using it as a text to discuss the injection of this point of view, it doesn’t get better than “The Birthday Party.”)
Of course, any text lends itself to discussion of the point of view and its effects, but we tried to present students with unusual examples, allowing students to really see the effects point of view can have on a work. (If you’re looking for a real challenge in a novel and have exceptionally mature students, you might consider reading Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides or Middlesex: in both novels, Eugenides does some interesting things with point of view, and in both cases, it’s arguable whether those choices are effective or not.)
Do your high school students also struggle to identify a text’s point of view? Do you focus on point of view in short stories as part of your curriculum? What short stories have you used to help students see unusual perspectives or the strong effects point of view can have on understanding a piece of literature? Reach out to us at [email protected] or DM us on Instagram @threeheads.works—we’d love to hear your thoughts!