How does the point of view contribute to the effectiveness of the story?

The narrator is not reliable in that he is profoundly flawed himself. The handicaps the reader begins to notice are not in the blind guest but within the narrator. For all his judgment of others, the narrator is more than happy to not turn his critical eye on himself, or to be confronted with as much. But he is alone – he has no friends (as his wife says), and he stays up watching TV stoned each night when she goes to bed. We begin to see the narrator's detachment from life and that the blind Robert clearly sees more than the narrator.