She's Come Undone Narrator:

First-Person (Central)

Since Dolores is most likely the she in She's Come Undone, it's appropriate that the girl falling apart narrates her story. It's easy to forget that Dolores is looking back at her life with an adult perspective—"I'm almost forty" (1.6), she tells us in the first chapter—but other than here, this framing device doesn't come back into play. It feels like we're growing up with her.

Still, the book is told in first-person, past-tense perspective. Dolores is telling the story from a vague present moment, so she has the ability to give us a little bit of foreshadowing and really emphasize the symbols, like the painting or the whales, which she wouldn't be able to do if she were narrating this in present-tense.