Point of View in William Trevor’s Cheating at Canasta: A Stylistic Analysis

This article looks at the linguistic construction of point of view in William Trevor’s 2007 collection of short stories Cheating at Canasta. The analysis uses the methodology of stylistics and pragmatics to identify meaning-making strategies and the goals they pursue in constructing point of view. Particularly, the “modal grammar of point of view” devised by Paul Simpson in Language, Ideology and Point of View provides a model for connecting different text typologies based on narratorial positioning and modality with different representations of perspective in text and for identifying the linguistic strategies at work in Trevor’s short stories to construct character’s psychology.