What is the narrator point of view in the novel, Two Wrongs?

In “Two Wrongs” Fitzgerald makes use of third person point of view, but manages over the course of the story to smoothly migrate the focal character without making this obvious to the reader. While the bulk of the story will be spent with one of the two main characters as the focal character, the story begins with Brancusi as the focal character. By describing what Brancusi “would have seen” (434), had he been paying close attention to Bill, Fitzgerald is able to use the point of view to describe Bill from an external perspective. This contrasts with moments in which the narrator’s point of view is aligned with Bill’s, such as when Bill’s move to London is described by the narrator as “a man of action…changing his base” (443). While this may be the way that Bill perceives his move, it is certainly a more generous perception than the truth, which is that Bill was forced to move because of multiple flops in New York.

Similarly, when the focal character changes to Emmy, the reader is able to see and understand things that would not be available if the point of view stayed only with one character for the entire story. For example, when Emmy makes her decision to stay in New York and let Bill go to Colorado alone, the narrator reports Emmy’s internal state directly to the reader, noting that she feels “ashamed of herself, miserable—and glad” (450). While Bill would not necessarily understand the full complexity of Emmy’s emotional state in this moment, which is full of ambivalence, because Fitzgerald is able to migrate the focal character, the reader is able to understand more than the character, a sign of Fitzgerald’s genius.