One side of the story

Authors Note: This writing piece is about how the narrator’s point of view of a story influences the reader’s thoughts towards the events or characters.

In “War comes to Willy Freeman”, Willy Freeman is a young girl who works at home with her mom while her dad is in the Revolutionary War. Her dad made Willy disguise as a boy so she could help him where the war was taking place. As she helped others with the guns, her father was killed right before her eyes by a British soldier. Moments later she was told that her mother was captured by the British and taken to New York as a slave. This story was written in the perspective of a young girl named Willy. From her perspective, some of the characters such as Captain Ivers and Mrs. Ivers were very malicious and cruel.

One way that Willy’s point of view influenced my thoughts toward the characters is how they treated her. After Mrs. Ivers was told that Willy’s mom was captured by the British and her father had been killed, she still didn’t want her living with them. Captain Ivers was the one to decide that Willy could stay with her aunt and uncle in the cellar, but only until he figured out what he was going to do with her. They would abuse Willy when she did one little mistake.

However, if the book had been in the perspective of Mrs. Ivers, things would have been different. Since Mrs. Ivers is white, she didn’t have to work because she had slaves to do that job. The ones that were not white were treated horribly. To the whites, they were only useful to do work and to work for them. For instance, the reader wouldn’t react to how tragic the war really was if the book wasn’t written in Willy’s perspective.

As you can see, the perspective of a story causes the reader to only see one side of an event. In “War comes to Willy Freeman”, Willy Freeman’s point of view influences the reader to feel the way Willy felt about the events and the characters because of the way she described them. While reading this story, I could understand the feelings that Willy interoperated by the way she described the characters and events within the book.