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Woolf often experimented with point of view in her stories. In “A Haunted House,” she primarily uses first-person point of view with pronouns I, my, we, and us. The narrator lives in the house with the ghosts and a partner, and readers know the narrator’s thoughts, feelings, and motivations as they follow the narrator’s actions throughout the text.
However, in the story’s stream-of-conscious narration, the point of view is sometimes second-person, addressing the ghosts with the pronoun you. For example, “But it wasn’t that you woke us.” At other times, the point of view shifts to the ghosts’ perspective, as when the narrator says “. . . death was between us.” The point of view even shifts to third-person, allowing readers to view actions, thoughts, and feelings from an omniscient outsider’s perspective. For example, the narrator relates things the living inhabitants of the house would not know, including the ghostly couple’s past. Another example is when the narrator describes the ghosts watching over the sleeping couple.
The shifts in point of view are often abrupt, at times leaving the reader to wonder from whose perspective they are seeing. For example, to whose hands does “My hands are empty” refer? Both the living narrator and the ghosts seek things that seem always just outside their grasp. The confusion may be intentional, forming a connection between the living and the dead.
