What is the narrator point of view in the story collection, Table For Two?

Towles employs a variety of points of view throughout the collection, as the seven stories do not share the same narrator and are not interconnected in any sense beyond their thematic resonances. "The Line" and "The Ballad of Timothy Touchett" are told by an omniscient third-person narrator who remains largely satellite to the broader plot, while "Hasta Luego," "I Will Survive," "The Bootlegger," and "The DiDomenico Fragment" each uses a first-person narrator. Meanwhile, "Eve in Hollywood," the novella that rounds out the collection, is told by a third-person narrator but switches between a variety of narrative perspectives, at various points occupying the viewpoints of Evelyn, Olivia, Charlie, Prentice, Litsky, Wendell, and Finnegan in order to create a kind of revolving door of perspectives on the broader atmosphere of Hollywood.

The shorter pieces in the collection each benefit from being told in their given point of view, as these choices allow Towles to present the third-person narratives as a series of fables and the first-person ones as explorations of the personal proclivities of those narrators. The first two stories in the collection, "The Line" and "The Ballad of Timothy Touchett," are told almost as nursery rhymes or children's lessons, with the quietly absurd nature of their respective plots giving way to a kind of anecdotal explanation of a moral value. Meanwhile, the first-person narratives that follow allow Towles to get at the fallibility of human judgement, as each of the narrators in the story is personally impacted in one way or another by the plots of the stories and is able to express themselves in a less detached manner.

The decision to narrate "Eve in Hollywood" from a variety of perspectives is useful to Towles for a number of reasons, particularly in terms of his ability to communicate the plot and his furthering of the collection's themes. Given that the second half of the novella, in particular, is centered around a whodunit story about blackmail, it is necessary for Towles to narrate from various perspectives in order to provide the reader with valuable information that they would not have access to were the story told from one character's perspective. However, the decision also allows Towles to present a kind of round table of attitudes about the ways in which wealth, class, ambition, and fame play on the psyches of people living in Los Angeles, ultimately allowing him to give a multi-perspectival take on some of the novel's overarching themes related to class, ambition, and gender.