What is the narrator point of view in the short-story collection, Only the Animals: Stories?

With the exception of "Telling Fairy Tales," all of Dovey's stories are told by animal narrators after their death. Some narrators acknowledge the fact that they are now dead (e.g., Sprout in "A Letter to Sylvia Plath" begins by saying, "I'd like to try to get the story of my death out," 203), while other narrators never explicitly acknowledge their own end (e.g., Plautus in "Plautus: A Memoir" ends her story saying, "Around the moon we went," giving no hints as to her death, 152). Generally, the narrators who are aware of their own death are more reliable than those who are not. Kiki from "Pigeons, A Pony, the Tomcat, and I" literally predicts her own death. It is no coincidence, then, that Kik is also extremely insightful about animal-human relationships, recognizing the limitations of her relationship with her own owner, Colette. Similarly, Sprout is extremely insightful about animal-human relationships: she muses on works in the literary canon (e.g., Plath, Hughes), while delivering her own perceptions about humans and animals (e.g., how both species "weave a web of intricate justification around any wrongdoing", 205). Thus, narrators aware of their own death and their status as story-tellers generally provide a more reliable narrative, winning the reader's trust.

The stories "Telling Fairy Tales" and "Red Peter's Little Lady" break from this pattern. "Telling Fairy Tales" is the only story told by an third-person narrator. The narrator introduces the reader to three characters--the witch, the black bear, and the brown bear--describing them objectively, without any added commentary. "Red Peter's Little Lady" employs a similar technique, but instead of using a third person narrator, Dovey employs the epistolary form--that is, the story is composed of letters exchanged between Red Peter, Hazel, and Evelyn. As a result, the reader gets a balanced view of all three characters: no one voice dominates the story.