Name: ________________________________ Date: ________________________________

CHARACTER AND POINT OF VIEW

Two Kinds

Amy Tan

A character is a person or animal in a literary work. Character traits are the individual qualities that make each character unique. These may be qualities such as stubbornness, a sense of humor, intelligence, and so on. You can identify character traits by making inferences, or educated guesses based on text details. When making inferences about character traits, consider how a character thinks, acts, and speaks, and draw conclusions about that character.

A character’s perspective is how he or she views events based on his or her experiences and emotions. A character’s point of view is the perspective from which the story is told. Here are two common types of point of view:

First-person point of view: The narrator is a character in the story and uses first-person pronouns such as I, me, and my.

Third-person point of view: The narrator is not a character in the story and uses third-person pronouns such as he, she, and they to refer to characters.

A. DIRECTIONS: Read the following excerpt from “Two Kinds.” Then, answer the questions.

America was where all my mother’s hopes lay. She had come here in 1949 after losing everything in China: her mother and father, her family home, her first husband, and two daughters, twin baby girls. But she never looked back with regret. There were so many ways for things to get better.

B. DIRECTIONS: Consider the mother and daughter as characters in “Two Kinds.” Make inferences about them by writing as many adjectives as you can think of that describe their character traits.