Kokoro Lesson Plan

How does the narrator bring us into his point of view?

The narrative frame of the entire story is the unnamed narrator writing about his experiences with Sensei an unknown length of time after Sensei's suicide. As such, over the course of the story, he makes many references, some more explicit than others, to Sensei's end, and he steps back from the story itself to comment on how he had not at the time realized the significance of a certain event or something that Sensei said.

This detached, almost critical eye with which the narrator retells his own story—that is to say, his memory—becomes very much the viewpoint that the reader takes. Indeed, we wonder along with the...