While the protagonist is unnamed, she is clearly a dynamic character and a school-age girl. As the narrator of the story, she primarily relates events from her childhood perspective, although the narrative voice sometimes includes interjections from the perspective of an older, more mature voice, indicating an occasional retrospective view of the story’s events. Over the course of the story, the young protagonist realizes that her father has a past and an internal life that she never knew about. While she is initially uncomfortable with this thought, she eventually comes to accept that there are some things about her loved ones that she might never fully understand. This shift in perspective represents a classic coming-of-age transformation that highlights The Disillusionment of Fading Childhood.

Although the protagonist is observant and self-aware, her youth and lack of exposure to the world also make her naïve. She is frank and honest, acknowledging her own fears and inconsiderate moments, as when she notes that she is “frightened of tramps” (Paragraph 5). Like Alice Munro herself, the protagonist is growing up in rural Ontario, Canada, and her family is suffering from the economic impacts of the Great Depression; concerns about poverty and class status are strongly present in the story as a whole.